I owned two netbooks over the years. They were good for what they were designed to be -- VERY inexpensive PCs with VERY good battery life (6-8 hours, which was pretty much unheard of at the time). But that was pretty much ALL they were good at. They made huge sacrifices to get there, including tiny unusable keyboards and highly underpowered CPUs that were optimized for low power consumption, at the expense of performance.
I distinctly remember being only somewhat impressed with the performance of my first netbook out of the box, but then after installing Windows firewalls and virus protection, it all went downhill from there. A PC that was barely usable, almost right out of the box. Woohoo!
So yes, I think Steve was right. People bought these for the extremely low price or for the extreme portablility -- a "throw away" laptop you could take on the road, just to check your email. That was my primary reason for buying it. And the battery life was such that I didn't have to pack my AC adaptor, and thus carry an entire laptop bag. So it fulfilled that purpose just fine.
I still own a netbook, a dual-core Atom this time, which I had planned to set up as an extremely low-powered file/media server. Haven't got around to it yet. It cost me less than $200, for a full Windows 7 PC with a 250 gig hard drive. I'm certain the manufacturer made next to nothing in profit on the sale of this thing. I can see why they're not terribly interested in continuing to sell them.
