The Netbook Is Dead

The Netbook Is Dead

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This article titled “Sayonara, netbooks: Asus (and the rest) won’t make any more in 2013″ was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 31st December 2012 13.01 UTC

Sayonara, netbooks. The end of 2012 marks the end of the manufacture of the diddy machines that were – for a time – the Great White Hope of the PC market.

If you believed ABI Research in 2009, then next year netbooks with battery like Asus AL23-901 Battery, Asus AP23-901 Battery, Asus Eee PC 1000 Battery, Asus Eee PC 901 Battery, Asus A22-700 Battery, Asus P22-900 Battery, Asus Eee PC 701 Battery, Asus Eee PC 900 Battery, Asus A32-W5F Battery, Asus Z35F Battery, Asus A31-W5F Battery, Asus W5F Battery (initially defined as machines with Intel Atom processors and screens less than 10in diagonally – though the definition became fuzzier over time) will sell 139m. (The original ABI press release with the forecast, linked from the Wikipedia page on netbooks, and still there until May 2011, has disappeared. But you can get a flavour of its optimism from the URL of the press release (which contains the phrase “an era begins”) and the research paper it was offering in late 2010 which had forecasts for netbook sales through to 2015 and the names of 23 vendors (including – quiz question – Nokia.)

Still, there’s an eWeek article from July in which ABI says that “consumer interest in netbooks shows no sign of waning, and the attraction remains the same: value rather than raw performance.”

Actually, the number sold in 2013 will be very much closer to zero than to 139m. The Taiwanese tech site Digitimes points out that Asus, which kicked off the modern netbook category with its Eee PC in 2007, has announced that it won’t make its Eee PC product after today, and that Acer doesn’t plan to make any more; which means that “the netbook market will officially end after the two vendors finish digesting their remaining inventories.”

Asustek and Acer were the only two companies still making netbooks, with everyone else who had made them (including Samsung, HP and Dell) having shifted to tablets. Asustek and Acer were principally aiming at southeast Asia and South America – but of course those are now targets for smartphones and cheap Android tablets.

That’s something of a turnround for Acer, which in September was still insisting that it would “continue to make netbooks”, even though Lenovo, Dell and Asustek had all withdrawn.

Intel, which made its Atom processor with the intent of aiming at lower-cost, lower-power, longer-battery-life PCs, is still going to keep making the Atom; those will be pushed into the embedded market for point-of-sale applications.

There are four candidates: the rest of the PC market (including the arrival of ultrabooks); the economy; the economics of netbooks; and the iPad plus the attendant rise of tablets.

Looking at the rest of the PC market first: the writing has been on the wall for a while. Even in May 2009, when netbooks were just two years old (and the iPad wasn’t even a rumour), Jack Schofield was asking whether netbooks were losing their shine, pointing out that