What a netbook is

Last Updated on April 18, 2024 by Dave Farquhar

What is a netbook? Maybe it would be a more appropriate to ask what was a netbook, because the product category is pretty much extinct at this point. But for a few years, it was a fast-growing product category.

Netbook origins

The origins of netbooks was a project called OLPC, for one laptop per child. The concept was a very small, inexpensive, low power portable computer for developing countries to use for education. In some of the design concepts, the computer ran off a hand crank, not a battery.

When people in the rest of the world started asking where they could get one of these inexpensive, low power computers, hardware manufacturers realized there was a market segment they had been ignoring.

Early netbooks like the Asus Eee PC shipped with 7-inch screen, undersized keyboard, the slowest Intel Celeron CPU on the market, 1 GB of RAM, and a Linux operating system of some type.

When the machines proved successful, Microsoft and Intel both reacted. Intel developed a newer, lower power CPU it called Atom, and Microsoft agreed to license Windows XP at a lower price point.

The devices sold well initially. But sales tailed off after a few years, and in 2013, the last two netbook vendors discontinued their remaining models. Lenovo brought the concept back as a Black Friday special less than two years later, but nobody wanted to call them netbooks.

The concept behind a netbook

The idea with these computers was for them to sell for less than $400 and provide something adequate for basic computing needs like email and light social media use. They caught on, leading more companies to enter the market, and rapidly drove prices down below $300. Sometimes even as low as $199.

They were intended to supplement a bigger, more expensive computer, not to replace it. It was almost a modern take on the palmtop concept, like the HP 200LX.

I bought one in 2009 because I took a job that would put me on the road a lot, but they didn’t provide me with a laptop. A $300 netbook provided at least an interim solution for my need. I could use it to make video calls home, I could do some business and personal writing from the road, and do other basic computer related tasks.

If that sounds like what people use tablets for, you’re not wrong. Inexpensive tablets probably killed the netbook more than anything else. But there was no such thing as an inexpensive tablet in 2007 when netbooks started getting popular.

What is a netbook good for today?

A 15-year-old netbook has a difficult time being useful today. That’s assuming the device even still functions. Sometime around 2014, the netbook I bought stopped functioning, and I wasn’t able to bring it back. At that point, I was running Linux Mint on it, but honestly, the main thing I did with it was driving an old Canon scanner that didn’t have support for anything newer than Windows XP. Sometimes the problem is the battery, and the device still works on AC after you remove the battery.

If I still had a netbook and it worked, I might put it to use exclusively for paying bills. Doing all of your banking from one computer that you don’t use for anything else is a good security practice.

But you don’t just have to use an old netbook for that. Any obsolete computer you can get cheaply but can run a current web browser can do that job just fine.

What’s the difference between a Chromebook and a netbook?

Conceptually, a Chromebook is the closest thing we have today to an old fashioned netbook. The processors that the least expensive Chromebooks use are the direct descendants of the processors that netbooks came with. The keyboards on Chromebooks aren’t quite as shrunken as the keyboards on netbooks were, so they are a little bit better to type on, and since the keyboard is a little bit bigger, it also means the screen is a little bit bigger.

But the reason Chromebooks are cheap is because the hardware doesn’t cost a lot, and Google basically gives away the operating system. They don’t have to make money on the operating system because their business model is to make money off cloud services.

So the netbooks of 2007 are the direct ancestor of Chromebooks.

But the other reason netbooks went away was because better options came along. The cost of full size notebooks continued to decrease, and those computers tended to be better built. They cost more, but for 50% more money, you got a computer that was at least twice as fast, more expandable, and would probably last twice as long before it broke.

Not only that, computers started lasting longer in general. They lasted longer before they broke and they lasted longer before they went obsolete.

From a historical point of view, netbooks are at least slightly interesting. They didn’t last terribly long as a product category, although they evolved into a very enduring product category. I don’t know how many people are nostalgic for them because they were very underpowered machines even when they were new, let alone after you’d use them a couple of years. And they were built to a very low price point, so the quality wasn’t terribly high. So they may have a bit of rarity to them, although scarcity doesn’t always translate into high value or collectability. There has to be demand for them as well.

But hopefully that answers the question of what a netbook is and why you won’t find one for sale at your local Best Buy or Office Depot today.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.