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Comment by lynguist

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us.

They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks).

Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price.

I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans.

It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing.

I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all).

On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago. I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.

parent lynguist 3 months ago

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