<story><title>Nexus 7 review: The best $200 tablet you can buy</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/28/nexus-7-review/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kleiba</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Four years on we&apos;re buying better laptops than ever before and, with the netbook class now more or less dead&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I still cannot get over the second part of that sentence. It&apos;s true though, but I could cry bitter tears over it: when netbooks first arrived on the scene I felt happy like a little elf: small, light, cheap computers made to run  Linux? That was &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; what I had been waiting for all these years.&lt;p&gt;And a netbook has been my main computer ever since I bought one. It&apos;s ideal for my personal usage in which I basically run four programs all the time: a browser, an email client, shells, and Emacs. Add a compile every now and then and you have a description of &amp;#62;95% of my computing time. I can code on the kitchen table or on the couch, on the bus, even in bed if I feel like it. It&apos;s fun.&lt;p&gt;I used to have a 12 inch laptop before but the netbook clearly beats it in terms of portability. And the battery life is decent too, even though the device is a few years old by now.&lt;p&gt;And I paid around $280 for the device.&lt;p&gt;And now the market for netbooks is dead. Taken over by tablets. Except, I have no use for them. I mean, it&apos;s a selfish way of looking at it because apparently many more people want tablets than netbooks. So let the market decide. Unfortunately for me, the perfect match will slowly but surely stop being available.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, I&apos;m not even using a netbook the way it was supposedly designed to be used: for browsing the web anywhere. As I&apos;ve outlined above I use it exactly like I use a desktop computer, except that I run heavier jobs remotely on other machines.&lt;p&gt;Anyway. I am not even sure what point I am trying to make. Probably none. But it does make me sad that a type of computer that is perfect for me is being replaced by another type of computer that is unusable for the same tasks.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nexus 7 review: The best $200 tablet you can buy</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/28/nexus-7-review/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>majorlazer</author><text>&lt;i&gt;In 2008, when the Eee PC was revolutionizing the computing world and driving every manufacturer to make cheaper and smaller laptops, Sony washed its hands of the whole thing. The &quot;race to the bottom,&quot; the company said, would profoundly impact the industry, killing profit margins and flooding the market with cheap, terrible machines. Sony was wrong, its stance lasting about a year before joining the competition with its own VAIO W.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I actually disagree with this first paragraph, I think Sony was right. The &quot;race to the bottom&quot; definitely did impact the industry, and for quite some time, no manufacturer even offered a laptop with decent build quality, except for Apple of course. People thought &quot;why should I pay $1,000+ for this laptop when I can get a much cheaper laptop that will do everything I need?&quot; And then the Macbook Air and the iPad come along and all of a sudden, people have no problem paying more for a quality product. If it wasn&apos;t for Apple, the OEMs would continue to release shitty machines until they all went bankrupt from negative profit margins.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t think the tablet market is experiencing the same race to the bottom because people are not buying these shitty tablets (which the Nexus 7 isn&apos;t). Everybody is still buying iPads and will continue to do so until a tablet that can actually compete with the iPad is released. (I have only seen two that even come close, the Galaxy and the Transformer, and still...) I think Apple has proven that consumers are willing to pay more if the product is good. And this is all coming from someone that does not own a single Apple product.</text></comment>