Buying Guide

Small Laptops: What Replaced the Netbook and What to Buy Instead

Netbooks were the story of 2008 to 2011: tiny, cheap, and everywhere. This site covered the Windows 7 Starter complaints, the dual-screen oddities and the Amiga-branded ones. Ten years on, the small cheap laptop exists in a different shape, and the lessons from the netbook years still tell you what to avoid.

What netbooks were and why they sold

The netbook formula was a 9 or 10 inch screen, a low-power processor built for phones and set-top boxes, a small solid-state or hard drive, and a price between 250 and 400 dollars at a time when a normal laptop cost twice that. They weighed about a kilogram and ran for six to eight hours. For email, browsing and writing on the move they were a revelation, and manufacturers shipped tens of millions in 2009 and 2010.

Why they died

• The processor could not keep up. Web pages, video and even the operating system grew faster than the chips did, and by 2011 a netbook felt slow at everything.
• The screen was 1024 x 600. Web pages needed constant scrolling, dialog boxes fell off the bottom, and text was small.
• Windows 7 Starter. The cut-down edition most netbooks shipped with could not change the desktop wallpaper, capped memory at 2 GB, and lacked features people expected. The backlash over it was one of the most-read stories on this site.
• Tablets arrived. From 2010 a tablet did the browsing and video parts better, with longer battery and instant wake, at a similar price.
• Thin laptops got cheap. By 2012 a real 13 inch laptop with a proper processor cost only a little more, and the netbook had no argument left.

Choosing a small laptop that does not frustrate you

1. Insist on at least 8 GB of memory and a 1920 x 1080 screen. The cheapest small laptops still ship with 4 GB and 1366 x 768 panels, and they repeat the netbook experience exactly.
2. Check the storage: 64 GB fills up after one operating system update. 128 GB is the bare minimum, 256 GB comfortable.
3. Try the keyboard. Below 12 inches, keys shrink and layouts get strange; 12.5 to 13.5 inches is the smallest size with a full-size keyboard.
4. Consider a Chromebook if your work happens in a browser. The operating system is light enough to feel fast on modest hardware, updates itself, and boots in seconds.
5. Consider a tablet with a keyboard if reading and video dominate and typing is occasional.

The oddities: dual screens, Amiga badges and USB-stick PCs

The netbook years produced experiments that this site covered with glee: a Japanese dual-screen netbook with two 10 inch panels side by side, a netbook sold under the Amiga name to a nostalgic audience, and a 25 dollar computer on a USB stick that became, in a different form, the tiny single-board computers hobbyists use today. Dual screens returned a decade later as a premium feature in some large laptops; the USB-stick PC idea lives on as the compute stick and the media player dongle. The Amiga netbook did not survive.