To be fair, you're comparing netbooks then what what we have now. At the time, the pokey, sluggish Atom was the best you could get for a lightweight system and longer-than-usual battery. Remember... the common alternative to a netbook then were awkward 1-2 inches thick 'desktop replacement' style monstrosities unless you wanted to pay a LOT of money relative to performance... and netbooks were $300ish versus $1200+ for laptops at the time. I was grateful for my netbook and they really did seem to push portables into becoming better at being... well, portable.
To be fair there were fairly compact/light* laptops at the time from a variety of manufacturers. But the period between, say, 2000 and maybe the late 2000s in particular laptops were becoming common but you had to make serious tradeoffs between price, size/weight, performance, and other features.
* By the standards of the time
I've had both a "subnotebook" (a Fujitsu) and a small Chromebook. The <13" form factor can be nice for travel but, in both cases, I ultimately came to the conclusion that the compromises relative to a 13" form factor that didn't weigh that much more just wasn't worth it.
Re:Dead Startup Toys
by thrower123 on Monday July 12, 2021 @02:08PM
(#27813240)
The Asus eeePCs were great for the time as a beat-around little on-the-go laptop, when most laptops were still 15 or 17 inches and weighed 5-10 pounds.
I really enjoyed the one I bought in college - it actually fit on those terrible fold-out desks that lecture hall seats have.
For "small," the category was replaced by Ultrabooks as people realized that it's usually better to have a thin laptop that doesn't force you to compromise on the display or keyboard size.
I remember traveling with a netbook so that I'd have a computer I could use for tickets and reservations, and even for that, the low resolution 8-10" netbook screens were painful. 12-14" Ultrabooks with >= 1080p panels are much more comfortable, and the weight is comparable.