More than a fad
In the middle of last year we asked if netbooks (or sub-notebooks as we referred to them at the time) were just a fad. We can safely say now that the answer is an emphatic no.
A recent survey revealed that 35 million netbooks are expected to be shipped this year. Furthermore, they remain one of the few sectors in the PC industry that continue to grow in spite of all the economic smelliness.
The emergence of another high growth form factor in the PC industry hasn't been met with the unconditional approval you might expect, however, and the main reason is price.
In many ways the popularity of netbooks is just the extension of an existing trend: cheap notebooks. It's been a couple of years since we started to see £300 notebooks emerging and before that we'd seen the price of entry level notebooks dropping by around £100 per year.
The arrival of the Eee PC, priced at under £200, took the cost of entry to the notebook market to an almost impulse purchase level and a lot of consumers followed that impulse. Rumour has it, however, that many of them ended up returning their netbooks when they found it couldn't do half the stuff they expected it to.
In other words, what they were hoping for was all the functionality of a full notebook, in a miniature chassis and costing 200 quid. Obviously that's a big ask, but the problem is that expectations have now been set and the grim realities of today's economic climate mean that consumers are more price sensitive than ever.
