I just recently sold my MBP due to the fact that it had been sitting on a desk, plugged in, and unused ever since I unboxed my iPad. I take my iPad with me everywhere I go. It is practically none existent compared to the MBP. I pull it out and use it in places where a laptop would be awkward. It is a 3G version, so I always have an internet connection, unlike the MBP. In short, I use it for almost everything I used a notebook for, and more. Not once have I missed my notebook.
It is important to note that I have a 27" iMac for home use, so the iPad is not a primary computer replacement, but it makes an unbelievable secondary computer. Having the right expectations for it is the key to getting the most enjoyment out of it. What expectations should one have? Watching the keynote introducing it is a good start. The iPad mostly fails at things it was never intended to be, but succeeds fabulously at what it is.
I've always thought of netbooks as being a bad idea all around. Now, there may be good netbooks out there, but the ones I have seen are crappy. Even ones by name brand manufacturers such as Dell and HP.
I have had a number of friend who have bought these largely because they were cheap had unreal expectations and were disappointed. The manufacturers have very low margins, and to make matters worse it cannibalizes some of their more profitable notebook sales. What do they get for that trouble? A diluted brand name from the customers who typically don't think about how little they paid, but how crappy the machine is.
I'm not sure that companies like Asus are not hurting. Yes, they sell lots of computers, but their profit margin is in the 3½ % range. Not much room for error.
Have you seen people you know switch to Apple products? I have. Even long time Windows users who would not have considered it just a few years ago and buying iPhones and iPads in droves. I think that partly Apple has executed very well, making lovely products, but partly that PC makers in the race for the bottom have diluted the value of their own brandnames by putting out cheap low quality products.
Just my 2 cents. Feel free to disagree.
crappy PC's... thats so new... the fall of netbooks makes sense, most people do not work on them, and they are not good for much besides being portable. This leads to choosing Intel's Atom over AMD's athlon-neo's and V class chips, as it lower battery life, for more preformance (though they cost more)
for me the fall of netbooks is a bad thing because it means there will be few cheap newbooks that can run games that are a few years fluently (which means they can do most task quickly).
also, when Apple lowers its product margin of the Ipad to lets say 20% maybe i would buy one, i don't believe that it costs under $300 to make and ship like most people says, but after selling over 3.5 million, i would think some of the design costs (a large part of which was making an itouch larger...)_ have been covered and that its time to stop making $150 of each one.
i lol whenever some complains about profit margin's in anything involving Apple.
I've had a netbook for about 2 years, and it has its advantages and drawbacks.
They're good for portability, and being able to do some e-mail, web, dump pictures when traveling light - I can do edits of RAW files in Picasa fairly well with it, and then upload them, so I can share them with family.
I could probably do some of that with an iPad, but it would be more expensive, I would have to buy a separate SD/USB adapter, I wouldn't be able to edit RAW files, next to no storage space, and it's hard to say how easy it would be able to upload a batch of photos, to either Picasa or Skydrive.
The problem with most netbooks, is that there's nothing to differentiate them, and they're getting squeezed from the low-end laptops...$350 for a bog standard netbook, with an Intel N450, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB HD, vs a dual-core Pentium or AMD, with 4 GB RAM and 250 GB HD for $400. Someone else brought up the growing line of ULV laptops, and I can see that too.
In a nut shell I think that is why iPad is successful and netbooks have a hardtime in the market. People expect to run a netbook like a laptop and with Windows 7 that leaves a lot to be desired.
Interestingly this is in part Apples arguement for AIR and the Mac Books. A good experience requires a certain level of performance for a given OS revision and apps.
The other thing with iPad is that it is only a rev one device. I'm actually expecting a major overhaul of the guts for next year.
With multimedia, etc, these netbooks are not optimized for these functions. So it is a choice between a powerful - and heavy laptop versus a iPad. Then there is the issue of apps.
Why? Of course there will be a new model coming out next year. There always is. It may have more features that add on to the current model. Sure. One expects that. Not a big deal. By the time the new model comes out, early adopters will have had theirs for a year.
Does the new model do something so compelling that one has to upgrade? Maybe, maybe not. One can upgrade or just stay with what you have.
The one year cycle is not a bad thing.
I feel for the guys who buy Android phones, which are topped 3 weeks later. And they have to hope that the manufacturer does not decide to blow off OS f/w updates for the phone you have because they have so many new models that they are working on that take priority over something they have already gotten their money from, and has essentially gone end of life.
I agree with you. I know there will be a refresh every year and know most of Apple's refresh schedule. However, the average person does not and many who ran out to buy an iPad I think will be a bit upset when v2 comes out with a webcam and more. They are possibly expecting Kindle type upgrades where it's nothing major. I was in Costco a few weeks ago and saw a couple looking at iPods, I told 'em to consider waiting cuz new iPods will be out in September. They had no idea that new iPods were coming out soon. The avg consumer has no idea of Apple's or any tech companies doings or roll outs.
One more thing I missed.: show me application on iPad that can play internet TV. Yes we have some grey market pages that allow watching TV even from other continents. I need to watch TV from my home country and from Europe even if I have intersting slew of sitcoms, teenager show series, comedy series here in the USA. Honestly i am too old for US coach potato offerings on TV and I need to see for example foreign news and foreign sports events (I do not like baseball and golf at all).
On netbook I install all needed plugins for some browser and I can watch streaming content. Can I do this on iPad or iPhone unless these are "Apple mandated" formats? I do not think so.
Count me in on iPad bandwagon as soon as Apple stops being hardheaded on flash and other media formats and encoders/decoders and allows other mobile networks. Even if HTML5 is way to go I do not see reason why I would resign from watching everything else now.
At one point I said that I couldn't see myself using an iPad. I went ahead and bought one anyway, the 16 gig 3G. I bought an Apple case, a bunch of apps, games and a month of wireless. But it turns out I was right. I really don't use it very much. I have to force myself. Oh well, it's pretty and all but not that useful. I also have an iMac which I use all the time. And an iPhone for on the go. How do other people use it?
Nothing is more better than waking up in the morning and checking out the news on my iPad while still in bed. And playing a game or some more reading before I retire.
If it weren't for Microsoft's strict OEM contract, I bet all netbooks would still have some Linux-based operating systems on them instead. I can think of that as being the only reason why they're considered "slow" and not that much different from normal laptops. Windows 7 is just not designed for those types of computers.
As for the iPad, I sold it. Waay to dependent on iTunes for my taste; after having my MacBook's keyboard just suddenly die. I'm sorry. Getting a netbook...
One more thing I missed.: show me application on iPad that can play internet TV. Yes we have some grey market pages that allow watching TV even from other continents. I need to watch TV from my home country and from Europe even if I have intersting slew of sitcoms, teenager show series, comedy series here in the USA. Honestly i am too old for US coach potato offerings on TV and I need to see for example foreign news and foreign sports events (I do not like baseball and golf at all).
On netbook I install all needed plugins for some browser and I can watch streaming content. Can I do this on iPad or iPhone unless these are "Apple mandated" formats? I do not think so.
Count me in on iPad bandwagon as soon as Apple stops being hardheaded on flash and other media formats and encoders/decoders and allows other mobile networks. Even if HTML5 is way to go I do not see reason why I would resign from watching everything else now.
You can try CineXPlayer and OPlayerHD apps for XVID, etc. etc. including http and rtsp streaming or something like that. YMMV, but there is some progress on that front.
If it weren't for Microsoft's strict OEM contract, I bet all netbooks would still have some Linux-based operating systems on them instead.
Nope, The reason netbooks don't still have Linux on them is because people kept returning them for refunds. People couldn't figure out what to do with the alien OS, and Linux netbooks were not compatible with anything. WXP was the only other OS that would run on those underpowered, cheep notebooks, and that is what people were comfortable with. It had nothing to do with strict OEM contracts.
If it weren't for Microsoft's strict OEM contract, I bet all netbooks would still have some Linux-based operating systems on them instead. I can think of that as being the only reason why they're considered "slow" and not that much different from normal laptops. Windows 7 is just not designed for those types of computers.
Actually, it was because of MS? strict OEM contracts that allowed Linux to get a seemingly large foothold on netbooks in the first place. Remember that Vista was selling when these devices emerged. It was because MS? opened up WinXP to be shipped on these machines that MS? regained its ground.
Then there are reports of people returning the Linux-based netbooks. I?ve used more than a few than they?ve all sucked. These are not for the average consumer looking for a small, simple machine. Sure, Linux is more efficient so it would feel faster than Windows but we?re still talking about an OS and GUI that is not intuitive and still not designed for a 10? display.
I returned my iPad, too, but it?s a much better machine than any netbook I?ve owned from the display panel type, the aspect ratio, the relative performance, the focus on core apps and the UI that is tailored for the device, not shoehorned in.
The netbook market had plateaued and even a more expensive option like the iPad appears to be eating away market share. Netbooks have always exhibited a very high rate of customer returns which shows that many people simply aren't happy with them regardless of the price.
A little more research reveals that the "very high rate of return" meme comes from stats from just one manufacturer, MSI, because they advertised the price difference boldly but failed to explain that those machines were running an OS that was very different from Windows.
Smarter companies see a very different trend:
Quote:
Mini 9 Netbook Running Ubuntu Returned Less Than XP
According the recent sales figures by Dell, the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook running Ubuntu Linux has been remarkably successful and experienced supremely low return-rates.
Unfortunately, MSI has been returned a great deal of its netbooks by consumers. A few months ago its MSI Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux brought in return rates four times greater than those of Wind netbooks running XP.
Dell?s Jay Pinkert, however, is pleased with Linux sales: ?A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux.?
As for the netbook market overall, it's true that the rate of growth is smaller than it was last year when growth in that segment was so often described as explosive, but note that sales are still growing year over year:
Quote:
Netbook Sales to Reach 36 Million in 2010
Last year, the netbook market practically boomed, showing an incredibly fast growth, and the segment has since continued rising as a fairly rapid pace. Still, the rate of growth appears to be slowing down, mostly because the market is starting to get saturated. Still, the amount of shipments is expected to rise for a while still, and Techaisle believes that this year, as a whole, will yield a 13% growth compared to 2009 in terms of sales.
Still, anyone enjoying a Microsoft OS on a netbook can thank Linux: before netbooks started shipping with Linux, Microsoft's OEM pricing was more than twice what is it now.
Congrats Apple. With that said, I feel for the early adopters when they release the iPad 2 with a webcam and probably more memory and possibly more hhd space will be annoyed at buying a product that will be so far behind in one year or less (iPhone > iPhone 3G), but those are pains of buying first gen I guess. Webcam, more memory and hdd space - that's what I'm waiting for.
Good for you.
I feel no pain with true 3g unlimited broadband for $30/mo.
Comments
It is important to note that I have a 27" iMac for home use, so the iPad is not a primary computer replacement, but it makes an unbelievable secondary computer. Having the right expectations for it is the key to getting the most enjoyment out of it. What expectations should one have? Watching the keynote introducing it is a good start. The iPad mostly fails at things it was never intended to be, but succeeds fabulously at what it is.
Are all netbooks garbage really - if you don't mind the small form factor?
Absolutely not but the haters would have you believe so.
lol
ipad is competition for motherboards? must be why those sales are down for one company
I've always thought of netbooks as being a bad idea all around. Now, there may be good netbooks out there, but the ones I have seen are crappy. Even ones by name brand manufacturers such as Dell and HP.
I have had a number of friend who have bought these largely because they were cheap had unreal expectations and were disappointed. The manufacturers have very low margins, and to make matters worse it cannibalizes some of their more profitable notebook sales. What do they get for that trouble? A diluted brand name from the customers who typically don't think about how little they paid, but how crappy the machine is.
I'm not sure that companies like Asus are not hurting. Yes, they sell lots of computers, but their profit margin is in the 3½ % range. Not much room for error.
Have you seen people you know switch to Apple products? I have. Even long time Windows users who would not have considered it just a few years ago and buying iPhones and iPads in droves. I think that partly Apple has executed very well, making lovely products, but partly that PC makers in the race for the bottom have diluted the value of their own brandnames by putting out cheap low quality products.
Just my 2 cents. Feel free to disagree.
crappy PC's... thats so new... the fall of netbooks makes sense, most people do not work on them, and they are not good for much besides being portable. This leads to choosing Intel's Atom over AMD's athlon-neo's and V class chips, as it lower battery life, for more preformance (though they cost more)
for me the fall of netbooks is a bad thing because it means there will be few cheap newbooks that can run games that are a few years fluently (which means they can do most task quickly).
also, when Apple lowers its product margin of the Ipad to lets say 20% maybe i would buy one, i don't believe that it costs under $300 to make and ship like most people says, but after selling over 3.5 million, i would think some of the design costs (a large part of which was making an itouch larger...)_ have been covered and that its time to stop making $150 of each one.
i lol whenever some complains about profit margin's in anything involving Apple.
They're good for portability, and being able to do some e-mail, web, dump pictures when traveling light - I can do edits of RAW files in Picasa fairly well with it, and then upload them, so I can share them with family.
I could probably do some of that with an iPad, but it would be more expensive, I would have to buy a separate SD/USB adapter, I wouldn't be able to edit RAW files, next to no storage space, and it's hard to say how easy it would be able to upload a batch of photos, to either Picasa or Skydrive.
The problem with most netbooks, is that there's nothing to differentiate them, and they're getting squeezed from the low-end laptops...$350 for a bog standard netbook, with an Intel N450, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB HD, vs a dual-core Pentium or AMD, with 4 GB RAM and 250 GB HD for $400. Someone else brought up the growing line of ULV laptops, and I can see that too.
Interestingly this is in part Apples arguement for AIR and the Mac Books. A good experience requires a certain level of performance for a given OS revision and apps.
The other thing with iPad is that it is only a rev one device. I'm actually expecting a major overhaul of the guts for next year.
Dave
With multimedia, etc, these netbooks are not optimized for these functions. So it is a choice between a powerful - and heavy laptop versus a iPad. Then there is the issue of apps.
What's multimedia, precious??
Why? Of course there will be a new model coming out next year. There always is. It may have more features that add on to the current model. Sure. One expects that. Not a big deal. By the time the new model comes out, early adopters will have had theirs for a year.
Does the new model do something so compelling that one has to upgrade? Maybe, maybe not. One can upgrade or just stay with what you have.
The one year cycle is not a bad thing.
I feel for the guys who buy Android phones, which are topped 3 weeks later. And they have to hope that the manufacturer does not decide to blow off OS f/w updates for the phone you have because they have so many new models that they are working on that take priority over something they have already gotten their money from, and has essentially gone end of life.
I agree with you. I know there will be a refresh every year and know most of Apple's refresh schedule. However, the average person does not and many who ran out to buy an iPad I think will be a bit upset when v2 comes out with a webcam and more. They are possibly expecting Kindle type upgrades where it's nothing major. I was in Costco a few weeks ago and saw a couple looking at iPods, I told 'em to consider waiting cuz new iPods will be out in September. They had no idea that new iPods were coming out soon. The avg consumer has no idea of Apple's or any tech companies doings or roll outs.
You need a case, if you don't already have one. I find the Apple's case dramatically improve my enjoyment of holding the iPad than when it's bare.
For me too!!!!
On netbook I install all needed plugins for some browser and I can watch streaming content. Can I do this on iPad or iPhone unless these are "Apple mandated" formats? I do not think so.
Count me in on iPad bandwagon as soon as Apple stops being hardheaded on flash and other media formats and encoders/decoders and allows other mobile networks. Even if HTML5 is way to go I do not see reason why I would resign from watching everything else now.
With multimedia, etc, these netbooks are not optimized for these functions.
What optimization do you want for which functions?
Most of them will display widescreen movies and TV shows and output 5.1 audio. The iPad is mono with a 4x3 screen.
At one point I said that I couldn't see myself using an iPad. I went ahead and bought one anyway, the 16 gig 3G. I bought an Apple case, a bunch of apps, games and a month of wireless. But it turns out I was right. I really don't use it very much. I have to force myself. Oh well, it's pretty and all but not that useful. I also have an iMac which I use all the time. And an iPhone for on the go. How do other people use it?
Nothing is more better than waking up in the morning and checking out the news on my iPad while still in bed. And playing a game or some more reading before I retire.
As for the iPad, I sold it. Waay to dependent on iTunes for my taste; after having my MacBook's keyboard just suddenly die. I'm sorry. Getting a netbook...
One more thing I missed.: show me application on iPad that can play internet TV. Yes we have some grey market pages that allow watching TV even from other continents. I need to watch TV from my home country and from Europe even if I have intersting slew of sitcoms, teenager show series, comedy series here in the USA. Honestly i am too old for US coach potato offerings on TV and I need to see for example foreign news and foreign sports events (I do not like baseball and golf at all).
On netbook I install all needed plugins for some browser and I can watch streaming content. Can I do this on iPad or iPhone unless these are "Apple mandated" formats? I do not think so.
Count me in on iPad bandwagon as soon as Apple stops being hardheaded on flash and other media formats and encoders/decoders and allows other mobile networks. Even if HTML5 is way to go I do not see reason why I would resign from watching everything else now.
You can try CineXPlayer and OPlayerHD apps for XVID, etc. etc. including http and rtsp streaming or something like that. YMMV, but there is some progress on that front.
If it weren't for Microsoft's strict OEM contract, I bet all netbooks would still have some Linux-based operating systems on them instead.
Nope, The reason netbooks don't still have Linux on them is because people kept returning them for refunds. People couldn't figure out what to do with the alien OS, and Linux netbooks were not compatible with anything. WXP was the only other OS that would run on those underpowered, cheep notebooks, and that is what people were comfortable with. It had nothing to do with strict OEM contracts.
If it weren't for Microsoft's strict OEM contract, I bet all netbooks would still have some Linux-based operating systems on them instead. I can think of that as being the only reason why they're considered "slow" and not that much different from normal laptops. Windows 7 is just not designed for those types of computers.
Actually, it was because of MS? strict OEM contracts that allowed Linux to get a seemingly large foothold on netbooks in the first place. Remember that Vista was selling when these devices emerged. It was because MS? opened up WinXP to be shipped on these machines that MS? regained its ground.
Then there are reports of people returning the Linux-based netbooks. I?ve used more than a few than they?ve all sucked. These are not for the average consumer looking for a small, simple machine. Sure, Linux is more efficient so it would feel faster than Windows but we?re still talking about an OS and GUI that is not intuitive and still not designed for a 10? display.
I returned my iPad, too, but it?s a much better machine than any netbook I?ve owned from the display panel type, the aspect ratio, the relative performance, the focus on core apps and the UI that is tailored for the device, not shoehorned in.
The netbook market had plateaued and even a more expensive option like the iPad appears to be eating away market share. Netbooks have always exhibited a very high rate of customer returns which shows that many people simply aren't happy with them regardless of the price.
A little more research reveals that the "very high rate of return" meme comes from stats from just one manufacturer, MSI, because they advertised the price difference boldly but failed to explain that those machines were running an OS that was very different from Windows.
Smarter companies see a very different trend:
Mini 9 Netbook Running Ubuntu Returned Less Than XP
According the recent sales figures by Dell, the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook running Ubuntu Linux has been remarkably successful and experienced supremely low return-rates.
Unfortunately, MSI has been returned a great deal of its netbooks by consumers. A few months ago its MSI Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux brought in return rates four times greater than those of Wind netbooks running XP.
Dell?s Jay Pinkert, however, is pleased with Linux sales: ?A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux.?
http://netbookboards.com/2009/02/24/...-less-than-xp/
As for the netbook market overall, it's true that the rate of growth is smaller than it was last year when growth in that segment was so often described as explosive, but note that sales are still growing year over year:
Netbook Sales to Reach 36 Million in 2010
Last year, the netbook market practically boomed, showing an incredibly fast growth, and the segment has since continued rising as a fairly rapid pace. Still, the rate of growth appears to be slowing down, mostly because the market is starting to get saturated. Still, the amount of shipments is expected to rise for a while still, and Techaisle believes that this year, as a whole, will yield a 13% growth compared to 2009 in terms of sales.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Netbo...0-151301.shtml
Meanwhile, Microsoft is not without its netbook issues:
Why Windows 7 on Netbooks Won?t Save Microsoft
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/0...ave-microsoft/
Still, anyone enjoying a Microsoft OS on a netbook can thank Linux: before netbooks started shipping with Linux, Microsoft's OEM pricing was more than twice what is it now.
Welcome to Ghandicon 3.
Congrats Apple. With that said, I feel for the early adopters when they release the iPad 2 with a webcam and probably more memory and possibly more hhd space will be annoyed at buying a product that will be so far behind in one year or less (iPhone > iPhone 3G), but those are pains of buying first gen I guess. Webcam, more memory and hdd space - that's what I'm waiting for.
Good for you.
I feel no pain with true 3g unlimited broadband for $30/mo.
Amen.