Daily Debrief: Netbooks make inroads to laptop market Video
Daily Debrief: Netbooks make inroads to laptop market Video Transcript
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>> Rafe Needleman: Hi. This is Rafe Needleman from CNET News.com, and I'm here at CES in Las Vegas with Dan Ackerman from CNET Reviews, and we want to talk today on the daily debrief about netbooks. Netbooks are not notebooks. They're like notebooks, but they're smaller. So let's start, Dan, first of all, what's the buzz around netbooks? What is a netbook first of all?
>> Dan Ackerman: Well, netbook is the new category of laptop we started seeing about a year and a half ago. They started out with the Ace's EPC, and they said, let's take a really small laptop, let's make it low cost, low power. We don't have to put high-end components in it like they had been putting in these low-end ultraportable laptops that cost like $2,000. They said, let's keep the small-form factor cheap out on the parts, make them $500, and you know what, everybody loved them.
>> Rafe Needleman: Why do people love them so much? I mean, what's so great about them.?
>> Dan Ackerman: It turns out, we've been kind of selling people too much computing power for years and years and years. You didn't really need all this. What do you do? You surf the web. You e-mail people. You work on like a Word document or something. Maybe you listen to some music. These little netbooks can do all of that for like, you know, $400 or $500.
>> Rafe Needleman: So what's new here at CES with netbooks. Like you said, it's a category we've seen before. What's happening bubbling up here at CES?
>> Dan Ackerman: Well, what happened going into this holiday season and here at CES is this category is really becoming one of the dominant mainstream categories for laptops. If you looked at like the Amazon sales ranks before Christmas, out of the top 20 best-selling laptops, like 18 of them were netbooks and the other two were like Macs. So people are really hungry for, you know, small, inexpensive machines especially with the economy the way it is. If you can get away with buying a $399, $499 machine instead of a $999 or $1,299 machine, you're going to do that.
>> Rafe Needleman: So it's kind of like, why buy an SUV when a Mini will do.
>> Dan Ackerman: That's right. Why, why buy a big, expensive 15 or 14 or 16 inch laptop when these little 10-inch models or 9-inch models do most of the same stuff.
>> Rafe Needleman: Any big product news in netbooks here at the show?
>> Dan Ackerman: What we're seeing now is we've seen kind of a third generation of netbooks. The first generation had like 7-inch screens, and some of them had Linux. Some of them had xp. The second generation moved up to 9- and 10-inch screens, and were basically all xp. Now we're seeing people take the form factor and kind of perfect it. Add extra stuff like express card slots, like mobile broadband, like nicer cases. HP has a version of this with like crushed metal on it. Somebody's got one they're calling the lifestyle PC, which is basically a netbook that they're trying to charge a few hundred bucks more for so they call it a lifestyle PC instead of a netbook, but, you know, they make it really nice. It's a nicely-designed system.
>> Rafe Needleman: So if these things take, continue to do well and take off, what effect does the netbook market have on the Windows model or the Windows marketplace?
>> Dan Ackerman: Well, what netbooks have done is that they've kept Windows xp alive well past its original expiration date. You can still get xp on all of these netbooks, and people are buying it in droves. At first, people bought Linux netbooks, and they bought xp netbooks, and then we found out they were basically returning the Linux ones and getting the xp ones because they have something people are familiar with. If you have a problem with your wireless, or you want to try to install some software, you can do that on xp. You try to do it on Linux, they're going to be lost.
>> Rafe Needleman: So the concept of Linux as a competitive OS kind of failing here.
>> Dan Ackerman: Not with these netbooks because they're really meant for, for casual users. People just toss in their bag. Take with them to the coffee shop. Take on the plane. They're great for like parents and kids and people who are not super computer savvy who don't need a lot of hardware power.
>> Rafe Needleman: Great, Dan. Thanks very much. You can read all our reviews of netbooks on CNET.com. For Dan Ackerman, I'm Rafe Needleman from CNET. [ Music ]
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