The Aberration Of Netbooks

2024-07-18

While cleaning out the other day I found, buried at the bottom of a storage box, thought to have been disposed of long ago - my first and only netbook. A type of machine that was literally everywhere just over ten years ago but now seems like an aberration in the personal computer timeline. A class of machine that came just before the advent of tablets and decently capable smartphones.

Netbooks were low-cost, low-power, and low-footprint laptops that had their heyday largely between 2007 and 2013; the first popular netbook being the Asus Eee PC. The triple E here being that the device should be "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play." And for the most part they were. Many netbooks had modest hardware, even for the time, so were often advertised as great ways to check email and 'surf the web' when on the go (This is pre-smartphone remember). This simplicity carried over to the physical design of the machines as well: a compact keyboard, a little track pad and an often simplified operating system. No number pads, convoluted swipe gestures, or fancy graphical effects here.

I had an Asus 1005PE, a fairly standard netbook that I'd largely picked out for the fact it had 'good' battery life of about seven hours. I'd decided upon it after walking up and down the aisles of my local computer store (online shopping wasn't quite there yet) and seeing stacks upon stacks of these little machines. You didn't need to check the specifications on any of them, they were all identical. Even now, nearly 15 years on, I can still recall that every machine had an Intel Atom processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM, 250GB spinning hard drive, 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 screen, 'chiclet'-style keyboard, and Windows 7 Starter Edition. Humble specifications for humble machines.

These humble specifications were my main computing device for probably four years after that. Work, assignments, reports, life online all carried out on a screen that you could count the pixels on, on keys smaller than a stamp, and with a track pad smaller than a credit card.

Was this a pleasant experience? Mostly. These were not multitasking machines, you had to choose what singular program you wanted open at a time lest things really slow to a crawl. They lent themselves to simple tasks as well; putting together documents, checking email, reading news articles and blog posts - you were not doing video editing or even watching videos in HD on this thing. These were machines for carrying a little bit of computing with you. You had to do 'a thing' with it and then it was back in your bag and you were on your way again.

Yet that little bit of computing went a long way as I owe my subsequent career to the 1005PE: It was the first machine I installed Linux on, Ubuntu 12.04 to be precise. Unfortunately Windows is not long for the netbook-world and after various updates the machine was simply not usable. After some digging I decided to have a go at installing this 'Linux-thing' - praying the entire time that I wouldn't inadvertently brick the machine.

The install worked and the machine was born anew. Everything was, and continued to be, snappy and responsive, far more so than I expected for the machines spec-sheet. Seeing what was possible with such basic hardware is probably the singular insight that has shaped every single one of my choices in Computing right up to now.

But where can we get experiences like that today? Netbooks essentially disappeared circa 2015 with the rise of ultra-books, tablets, and smartphones. Chromebooks somewhat fill this use-case in the abstract: portable machines with (relatively) low-powered hardware and a strong educational presence. But pricing in many cases is a far-cry from the sub-£200 most netbooks were. Chromebooks also fit into their own Google eco-system while netbooks were entirely standalone computers that you could install and run whatever you wanted on. In the same way tablets and smartphones are their own entirely separate class of computer that are even more restricted in terms of functionality.

As time goes on I'm surprised that netbooks haven't become more popular rather than less so. Cheap portable fully-fledged computers that you can install and run whatever you want on sounds like a really compelling selling-point to me. For developers, most work is increasingly done on remote machines reducing the need for a high-powered CPU and extensive storage to do that work locally. Or for those of us that deliberately try to work with a small computing footprint, a netbook is good to go right out of the box. And for the less technologically-literate, I hear it repeatedly that many would appreciate a slightly larger screen and 'proper' keyboard rather than jabbing at a 6-inch sheet of glass.

Netbooks have come and gone from my mind repeatedly over the years. Working with students carrying 17-inch plus 'laptops' that consume more desk space than an actual desktop and colleagues with steely gun-metal gray MacBooks. It was in looking at the laptops around me that I finally figured out what best describes netbooks: 'comfy'. They were these little, modest machines with rounded edges (in every sense of the word) that offered an approachable way to get a hold of a portable computer for many. At the time they were popular, you probably already had a home desktop machine so these hardback-sized companions offered a way to bring a little bit of computing with you.

It'd be nice to see that again.