To me, laptops are crippled with their excessive weight, excessive heat, and noisy/prone-to-fail moving parts.
Many people have little need for graphics horsepower,
and just want the nicest possible lightweight netboook with no moving parts.
Basically, a dell mini 9 with a decent keyboard…

The profit margins on these Netbooks must really suck to have nearly all the hardware makers and manufactures so scared.

They want to sell Netbooks, but only if people are also buying a new Quad core machine with all the bells and whistles. Heck, the people who make DVD/CD/BD drives must be going nuts, because these Netbooks go out the door without any optical drive at all.

Yeah and a traditional cheap notebook doesn't totally suck with its pathetic 2 hour battery life. The uni I attended has started disabling and cutting off electrical outlets in classrooms and other places all over campus because everybody is constantly plugging in to keep their massive wasteful laptops juiced for free so they can email, IM, and read MySpace while on campus.

hey Brad, nice job throwing a “that's what he said” in there. Very classy.

Does anybody know if there's really any netbook manufacturer with one product in the works with the ION platform in our very near future? If so, I'm willing to wait for it – hate to buy something that becomes outdated in a few months…

I have an Asus Eee 1000H, with an old version of Adobe Photoshop Elements on it; Elements has works well, for what I've directed it to do. And my Asus 1000H does a good job with streaming audio — no visual — from the Web; downloads that were over 50 minutes long ran properly.

But I've had less success with audio-visual programs. I tried running a seven-minute ProShow Gold slide show (including a sound track), but the show stopped about halfway through; the same slide show runs properly on a “full” PC. An audio-visual presentation from another source also ended prematurely.

yup .. bacause it is NO REAL COMPUTER i run, e.g. (among others) corel draw 10, photoshop 5, some office suits, flash and video producing software on it … and use it as platform for great music synthesizers … some webpublishing and project management aside … it is NO REAL COMPUTER …. but usable with one charge a whole day everywhere i go. only did cost me some 250 bucks, so ……

[...] Originally posted here: NVIDIA CEO: Netbooks are just crippled bcomputers/b [...]

He's way off about Microsoft – I'm running XP Pro and Office on my S101 with no problem. And he's completely missing the point of netbooks. They aren't intended for playing graphics-intensive games or doing serious graphic design, although some people do these successfully. Netbooks are not intended to be primary PCs, although my husband's Eee 900 works perfectly that way. Netbooks are meant to be just that — small, lightweight, sturdy, inexpensive travel companions, with which you can surf the net, send email, and do other basic stuff — and netbooks do all of these things perfectly. But of course Huang wouldn't see the value in that.

Same philosophy as the car makers, same results. Super-nerd power gamer PCs are a limited market. I'm sorry, but these computers are for getting email, surfing and playing some basic time waster games like mahjong. Welcome to commodity computers…cheap, portable and almost disposable. No margin for the fat-cats? To freaking bad. Unlike the automotive market they can't hide behind “safety” lobbyists to hold a monopoly and prevent start-ups from fullfilling this unsavory market segment. Adapt or die.

He's way off about Microsoft – I'm running XP Pro and Office on my S101 with no problem. And he's completely missing the point of netbooks. They aren't intended for playing graphics-intensive games or doing serious graphic design, although some people do these successfully. Netbooks are not intended to be primary PCs, although my husband's Eee 900 works perfectly that way. Netbooks are meant to be just that — small, lightweight, sturdy, inexpensive travel companions, with which you can surf the net, send email, and do other basic stuff — and netbooks do all of these things perfectly. But of course Huang wouldn't see the value in that.

Same philosophy as the car makers, same results. Super-nerd power gamer PCs are a limited market. I'm sorry, but these computers are for getting email, surfing and playing some basic time waster games like mahjong. Welcome to commodity computers…cheap, portable and almost disposable. No margin for the fat-cats? To freaking bad. Unlike the automotive market they can't hide behind “safety” lobbyists to hold a monopoly and prevent start-ups from fullfilling this unsavory market segment. Adapt or die.