‘Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks’
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has issued an admiring indictment of Apple in connection with the death of the netbook industry. It’s a compelling case:
If you study the PC industry over the past five years, you find only one company that had the means, motive, and opportunity. Apple killed the netbook, more or less single-handedly, and we should all be grateful for it.
Netbooks were terrible machines, a technological blight that threatened to become the future of computing. They had awful, nearly unusable keyboards, very slow processors, and they ran versions of Windows or Linux that were a trudge to use on tiny screens. Yet despite their awfulness, they were embraced by the world’s largest tech firms-Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Lenovo were all gaga for them.
Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks.
(2012’s most-read Buzzblog posts)
Add in the fact that low margins meant netbook manufacturers couldn’t make any money off the machines, Manjoo argues, and you’ve got the perfect lose-lose proposition.
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