This didn’t come as a massive surprise, since Intel’s margins on the Atom and other components used for mini notebooks are.. well, very marginal at best.

Intel’s general sales manager Sean Maloney has told Reuters that you’d basically want your first computer to be “the real thing” and not some scaled-down netbook. It’s slightly ironic considering that Intel backed the netbook concept to have somewhere to place their Atom chips after the miserable failure of MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). Atom-based mini  laptops caught on quick and are now boasting a surprisingly large percentage of overall notebook sales.

Elonex One - one of the first (and ugliest) iterations of the netbook.

The rise of netbooks probably exceeded Inte’s expectations by leaps and bounds, and now the company is trying to mitigate some of its lost sales on the much higher-margin mainstream processors. They do acknowledge that there’s at least one user group who might want a netbook as their first PC, namely 7 to 11-year-olds.

source: Reuters

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