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. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold.
Regardless of the downsides of Apple’s approach, no more netbooks is a definite plus.
(Source: azspot, via falconieri)
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I believe this is the work of a fellow tumblr, Jonathan Mak.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsmgeq5arR1qzs5cqo1_400.png)
