Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry

Quoting:Intel and Microsoft warn that consumers should remain skeptical about the performance of a computer that costs less than $300.

“When these things are sold, they need clear warnings labels about what they won’t be able to do,” said Sean M. Maloney, the chief sales and marketing officer at Intel.

No. They should come with warning labels that they come with a crappy OS and hardware limited to the standards of a crappy monopolist.

I think ARM will be great for netbook manufacturers. ARM means no Windows so the hardware limitations go out the window. I expect ARM notebooks to quickly gain a lead hardware-wise on Intel/Windows netbooks. And in those cases I predict customers will want the most bang for their buck and go with ARM (and Linux) instead of Atom/Windows.

ROFLMAO

If there's a company that knows about hardware needing warning labels, it's Microsoft. Remember the "Vista Ready" labels on laptops with 512 MB of RAM and a single-core processor?

What really makes this funny is that Microsoft plans to make money on netbooks by selling a crippled version of Windows 7, and then when customers realize they've been tricked, the only option is to pay to remove the restrictions.