It took a very long time for me to decide to purchase a netbook, but now I have done so. Right now, I am the proud owner of an Asus Eee 1005 and I must say it’s incredibly sweet. Once I realized that I was already a two-machine person (the mini HTPC and the MacBook Pro) before, the decision to go back to a two-machine setup (the MacBook Pro HTPC and a simple netbook) instead of constantly plugging/unplugging the single machine was made much, much easier.
During my trip to J&R where I tested keyboards & trackpads like a mofo — this being the critical factor of choosing a netbook — I was surprised as the absolute flood of customers checking out these things. It became clear that the netbook is the new reality. The critical needs for a computer are covered by these: writing that paper, checking your bank balance, video chatting with your parents, etc.. It’s only the media experience that’s left, and that’s where the new models are headed. Before, there were only clunky Linux builds for these things, and now there are choices a-plenty. If I were a hardware manufacturer, I’d have been unnerved by this shift for sure.
But these shifts are good. They’re growing pains in a still incredibly immature field. It reminds me of the shift from the CD-ROM era, and how we all moved to the Internet right at the time when everyone finally had drives and CPUs that were fast enough to handle good Cinepak compressed video. The explosion for multimedia CD-ROMs (remember the original Blender, anyone?) never happened because the Internet supplanted it.
The Internet was the superior choice, of course. And wherever netbooks & mobiles & ultraportables ultimately lead us, that style of computing will be superior to the laptops and desktops of today.
