AMD CEO sees Netbooks going away
Advanced Micro Devices' chief executive predicts that Netbooks will eventually disappear. This thinking, though obviously favorable to AMD's strategy, isn't completely at odds with Intel's.
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The lightweight HP Pavilion dv2, which uses the AMD Neo processor, is marketed as a notebook
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)"The distinction between what is a Netbook and what is a notebook is going to go away," AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said Thursday in the company's earnings conference call.
"There will be a continuum of price points and form factors," he said.
"Given the way Netbooks are configured today, consumers who want a notebook at those kind of (low) price points have to compromise and as a result don't enjoy a full PC experience, particularly around the graphics and media capability of the machine," Meyer said. "And likewise people who wanted a thin and light machine had to pay a lot of money, typically well over a thousand dollars."
Upcoming inexpensive ultra-thin notebooks will meet the need for a small, thin, lightweight laptop that is more powerful than a Netbook, Meyer said.
This sentiment is actually backed up to some extent by Intel's recent behavior. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, in that company's earnings conference call last week, spoke oddly of Netbooks in the past tense. He said the buzz around Netbooks at the Consumer Electronics Show "validates our view that (the market) had a high potential for growth and it was an exciting segment, in particular in this kind of economic environment." (Emphasis added.) Otellini did add, however, that he expected Intel "would do very well in the Netbook market in the course of the next couple of years."
Whether his use of tense is just a way to refer to the Netbook market to date or a Freudian slip tied to Intel's intention to bring out new mainstream Core architecture chips for inexpensive thin notebooks later in the year, is not clear. This chip platform could potentially suck a lot of the enthusiasm out of the Netbook market.
And Intel has small plans for its Atom processor in 2009. Aside from a tiny increase in processor speed and a slight improvement in graphics, nothing big is slated for the platform. Is the demise of the Netbook market as we know it today something both AMD and Intel agree on? We'll see.
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
should say that the name "netbook" is goin away.
But the distinction will always remain, as people like me will want to buy laptops(and shell out the mega bucks, even if it means taking out a second mortgage :)) to play the latest games on them, and not even Ion can play Crysis, for example.
"There will be a continuum of price points and form factors"
So are you telling me that aren't numerous form factors now? There are notebooks for various users that are as light a 2 lbs and as heavy as 15 lbs. There are models with displays as little as 7" and going through 20.1". There are models for performance all the way from low end like the Intel Atom all the way to quad core models. Maybe AMDs product line is only midrange, but Intel seems to realize that there is a broad spectrum of interests and for the most part they have a product to meet interests across the board.
Another funny one was:
"Given the way Netbooks are configured today, consumers who want a notebook at those kind of (low) price points have to compromise and as a result don't enjoy a full PC experience, particularly around the graphics and media capability of the machine"
I think most people realize that they are making a tradeoff. Having sold computers in the past I knew a lot of people who weren't really interested in a full PC experience. While a lot of people won't want to make said tradeoff there is more than enough demand for such laptops to justify their sale.
After making it up, now you say it's going away? Now that Sony has reported unprecedented loss?! Along with other CNET article that says netbooks are dead??!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10145482-23.html
Did I just reveal the scheme? How much is Sony paying CNET for such a campaign against the low-cost sub-notebooks? Sounds like manipulation to me.
I hope that Intel stops putting resources into netbook architecture, and that AMD never enters it. It would be a good chance for ARM and MIPS (read: Non-Windows-compatible) processors to make their way into netbooks. Naturally, they'd need to run Linux or Unix...
I think the netbook market will probably grow, and stimulate the rebirth of the desktop market. People having a desktop computer for real processing power, and a netbook for out-and-about. That's a much better idea than buying a "desktop-replacement" laptop that is not really very powerful and not very portable. Netbooks are good enough really; I use mine as a miniature media centre playing H.264 videos on my TV!
For portability - the netbooks are great. Once we hit 10 hr run time on battery for netbooks - that'll be even greater!
Netbooks do not give the best bang for the buck and never will... laptops continue to get cheaper and will easily absorb whatever is left of the netbook market in the next two years. Why spend the money on one of these when the very next app my daughter wants to use may not run well or at all on it? Yet I can get a laptop for about the same price and it will for sure?
Having used a netbook for a month, I'm waiting for the tabletpc versions to ship. That should provide, not a notebook, but a 'super-PDA'; larger screen, larger storage, WinXP and/or Linux programs. Anyone that has Wi-Fi in the house, should try a netbook. It's the electronic umbilical to the e-world that cell phones didn't realize. Look for movies at the lunch table, check the sales from the breakfast table. Or just look up those endless things your wife asks while watching Fringe, Eleventh Hour or CSI.
"Netbooks" are/ will be driving laptop innovation. Lines WILL disappear.
* & for the record, The Macbook Air is a netbook... an absurdly expensive netbook
- by Dan_Ackerman January 23, 2009 2:56 PM PST
- It's rare that I jump into these things, but there's some nonsense here that needs to be set straight. Obviously both Intel and AMD (and Dell, HP, Acer, etc.) would love to sell you more expensive, higher-margin products rather than less expensive, low-margin products.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (31 Comments)To this end, all parties involved have disparaged the Netbook concept to some degree, but it's clearly a case of trying to push consumers towards the products they want to sell you, rather than creating the products consumers are demanding.
On another note, all public statements by tech company CEOs (even more so than the regular PR drones) should be filtered through the "What outcome am I trying to influence?" test.