This is one of my pet peeves. Netbooks were great as a small disposable internet console. They weren't just for consumption - the keyboard meant you could use them to compose text. The problem was that people bought them when they wanted a super cheap laptop, and so netbook manufacturers kept making the screens bigger and the processors faster until they stopped being netbooks and turned into crappy cheap laptops.
The new wave of tablets with keyboard covers are basically what netbooks were, but for a good decade there we lost the idea of a small cheap internet console which could be used to compose text.
Which like Android afterwards, kind of proved the point of what happens when OEMs get to ship their own distributions.
I've got a Samsung NC10[1] running Haiku beautifully. It's a 32-bit machine with just 2Gb of RAM and it's never run so smartly. I'm very impressed by Haiku's stability and consistency. The extended attributes on files are an eye-opener. Your mail client is a settings window, a compose window and a file manager. Just add the attributes you need for email to the list view.
Otherwise they wouldn't need to pivot it into a general laptop OS.
- Safari
A lot of people run web browsers.
- Firefox (streaming audio)
A lot of people stream audio.
- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs
That's a weird one, sure.
- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.
Also weird, but "average people" need to do some kind of automation once in a blue moon, so let's not discount that.
- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad
The conversion is unusual, but people download videos to their iPad.
- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms
A little niche, but "media server" is still a thing.
- An FTP program doing weekly backups
Backups are a thing. A thing more people should be doing, but definitely a thing.
- A mail client
Not niche at all.
- A VPN client
Not niche if your office requires a VPN. A lot do.
- A spreadsheet
Definitely not niche.
- An IDE (Coda2)
Sorta niche-y, but think of it as "text editor" and it's less so: it could be a word processor, or Scrivener.
Currently open on my machine:
- Safari
- Firefox (streaming audio)
- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs
- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.
- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad
- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms
- An FTP program doing weekly backups
- A mail client
- A VPN client
- A spreadsheet
- An IDE (Coda2)
And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined.
People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's "thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non-technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem.
Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer, you have to have an actual laptop computer.