[BRIEF NOTE] On the netbook
May. 20th, 2009 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIf I read Wired more frequently, I might have come across Clive Thompson's article in the February issue, "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" before now. In it, he writes about how the netbook--a relatively low-powered portable computer that, instead of computing everything itself, instead sources everything to Internet-based programs--is radically altering the computer market. It all started with an attempt by one woman to come up with a cheap portable computer suitable for purchase in poor country.
Thompson suggests that, because of their cost and their high degree of functionality, and because future netbook computer users won't necessarily need to or want to use high-powered software like Photoshop, netbook computers are the wave of the future, as opposed to unnecessarily powerful computers like--say--the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I'm using to type this entry.
This interests me greatly, not only because of what it says about the future of computing--networks of relatively low-powered terminals connected to a high-powered Internet--but because of its strong similarities to the first mass computer network. I refer, of course, to the Minitel, a French computer network active from the early 1980s with millions of subscribers, a network that made use of dumb terminals connected to strong servers. I used the Minitel model myself for a global computer network in an alternate history that I wrote some years back, the Euronet. It's nice to be vindicated, much too late for the Minitel, perhaps, but not too late for myself. I like being a good futurist, or whatever you call what I did back then.
The miserly constraints spurred [Mary Lou Jepson] to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.
To build the laptop, dubbed the XO-1, One Laptop per Child hired the Taiwanese firm Quanta. It's hardly a household name, but Quanta is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world. Odds are that parts of the machine on your desk, whether it's from Apple, Dell, or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta—possibly even designed by Quanta. Like most Taiwanese computermakers, it employs some of the sharpest engineers on the planet. They solved many of Jepsen's most daunting engineering challenges, and by 2007, the OLPC was shaping up. The poor kids of the world would have their notebook—if not quite for $100, for not a whole lot more.
Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.
What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.
Thompson suggests that, because of their cost and their high degree of functionality, and because future netbook computer users won't necessarily need to or want to use high-powered software like Photoshop, netbook computers are the wave of the future, as opposed to unnecessarily powerful computers like--say--the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I'm using to type this entry.
This interests me greatly, not only because of what it says about the future of computing--networks of relatively low-powered terminals connected to a high-powered Internet--but because of its strong similarities to the first mass computer network. I refer, of course, to the Minitel, a French computer network active from the early 1980s with millions of subscribers, a network that made use of dumb terminals connected to strong servers. I used the Minitel model myself for a global computer network in an alternate history that I wrote some years back, the Euronet. It's nice to be vindicated, much too late for the Minitel, perhaps, but not too late for myself. I like being a good futurist, or whatever you call what I did back then.
