sweet netbook

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Tue May 26 22:50:11 UTC 2009


On Tue, 26 May 2009, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

| From: Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>

| To me the benchmark netbook is still the original 7" Asus; I feel like
| I've already stretched the category with my 10" system.

Agreed.  Besides, I had a fine 10.6" subnote some years ago.  There
are quite a few 12" notebooks too.

Less is more.

| And while a
| faster GPU would always be welcome -- allowing a netbook to function as
| a full-screen media player -- it should not come at any significant
| penalty of battery life or price.

Right.

I think that Intel's current support chips are not well-designed for
netbooks.  Too power hungry.

nVidia's chipset supposedly has a similar power budget but better video
performance.

I'd rather go the other way: reasonable modest performance and much
lower power.

| I think the category will be rebooted when the first ARM-based netbooks
| arrive and reminds everyone what their special appeal was n the first
| place.

Maybe.  I have trouble predicting the market -- it doesn't like what I
like, or if it does, it is for different reasons.

The HP Journada series of the past was a bit like that and it didn't
fly.  WinCE might have been a problem.

I like Linux but I don't know that it is an easy sell.  Lots of
netbook manufacturers seem to have retreated from it.  Of course we
think that they didn't do Linux right.

Sadly, Intel and MS are scared of cannibalizing sales of their
higher-price products and so, via licensing agreements, limit the
capabilities of netbooks.

| Just as Microsoft struggles to keep Windows cheap and lean enough
| for netbooks,

The problem is to manage price differentiation.

| along will come a design that will be far harder to port
| to than simply reviving XP. The ARM processor is getting better and
| builders have the choice of Android or Ubuntu platforms.
| 
| http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9527593286.html
| 
| I think that ARM is a far more dangerous threat to Intel in netbook
| space than AMD could ever hope to be.

I don't understand this.  The ARM has been around for a while.  Ditto
AMD low-power chips.  Yet the netbook came out with the Atom, more or
less.

The OLPC XO may or may not have been an inspiration for the netbook.
It has an AMD CPU.

I admit that the original Asus netbook had a ULV Pentium M.  I'm not
sure why.

Intel was trying really hard to derail or turn the OLPC project.
Maybe the Atom was part of that, but that seems insufficient
justification.

Intel was a strong player in the ARM world (StrongARM, xscale).  Maybe
when they ditched that they felt they had an exposed flank and built
the Atom to cover it.

The Atom was mentioned as being aimed at things like cell phones.  If
so, its power budget makes it a failure.  But maybe that will improve.

| While AMD and VIA play catch-up
| with what are essentially Atom-wannabes,

AMD and Via have had useful low power x86 processors for years.
Something I don't know made netbooks crystalize around the Atom.
Perhaps Intel seeded the OEMs with reference designs.  Perhaps the
first Asus netbook showed a market.

Perhaps it is all marketting: users thought they knew what a netbook
was when they saw it (a notebook, cut down).  Maybe they didn't see
what they could do with, say, a Nokia n800 or an OLPC XO.

| ARM is a departure that will
| start to make netbooks resemble the iPod Touch and Nokia N800 more than
| regular laptops.

What are you thinking of?  Those models already exist.  As far as I
can tell, they are failures as platforms.  The iPhone seems to be a
success.  But all I hear is (some) buzz.  I don't know reality.

| Indeed, if you think of the roots of the Moblin project, its original
| intent was to keep Intel relevant in the realm of devices smaller than
| netbooks. The project has shifted gears to focus on "conventional"
| netbooks (probably with the urging of a Novell struggling to be relevant
| in netbook space), however the goal of Moblin is to provide the software
| support needed by Intel as it tries to go downscale.

Novell?

As far as I can tell, most packages in Moblin come from Fedora.  The
tool chain comes from SuSE.  I don't know about the kernel.

At this point, the Moblin folks don't appear to be sending things
upstream.  I hope that will change.

I wonder/fear that Linux is wielded as a threat the MS more than an actual
tool, at least in the netbook space.
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