Netbooks were a quick success in 2008 thanks to the small formfactor and low price, but Intel’s segment has lately become more and more irrelevant. Most major manufacturers are abondoning the segment and for example Asus is planning to replace the Eee PC netbooks with Transformer tablets.
Intel calls the netbook a ”consumption device,” and were never powerful machines, but just enough to browse the web, reading e-mails, watching movies and generic use. Not far behind the netbook notebooks with normal hardware starting coming down in price to compete with netbooks. Tablets but also smartphones have lately been able to fill the same role as netbooks, but Intel still sees a role for netbooks in developing countries, but manufacturing partners disagrees.
Digitimes reports that several major actors will scrap their netbooks series. Asus will stop making the Eee PC product series and officially phase out netbooks as soon as stock runs out. Asus is planning to replace netbooks with the Transformer series tablets that comes with a dockable keyboard.
Netbooks soon a thing of the past
Acer has no official plans for netbooks, but based on previous statements this is not a segment it will focus on. Also MSI plans to stop selling netbooks soon. Besides scrapping netbooks, also nettops with Atom will be rare.
As a result the sales of Intel Atom N2600 and N2800 for netbooks and Atom D2700, D2500 and D2550 for nettops are expected to drop with 50 percent in Q4. Next year only Intel and a few minor actors are expected to use the Atom N series, while the Atom D series will be phased out. It will be interesting to see how Intel will counter this, since the data sheed on Valleyview clearly specified Intel believed Atom had a place in PCs.
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