Netbooks a surprise?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/16/noughties_review/page7.html

My turn to be surprised. Once when working for IBM (no it wasn't a good personal fit)  I remember being at Almaden talking to some there. I was seeing clearly that laptops was the future. I couldn't get out of my mind that they were so very similar to the once so common and cheap home computer. However the price was all to high. There wasn't, in my mind any good reason for that. They should be cheaper since its all integrated!

The Macs were all integrated. But even more expensive. Apple must have made a lot of profit on their monopoly platform over the years.

Now netbooks are here and are fully capable PC's, and they are suddenly cheap. It used to be that smaller was more expensive. But that's probably because exec people were willing to pay for it.

Now its the future. Only problem for me: it makes it difficult to easy rationalize paying much for the smaller capable smartphones.

Who knows maybe they're next in line?