For a long time, I've been looking for the sweet spot between the
often contradictory demands of portability, affordability, and
usability. I'd begun to believe that you could get any two of these in
one device, but that I would never find something that offered all
three. Among others, I've tried:
- Various PDAs and most recently an iPod touch. These have been
relatively affordable and certainly portable. But while they've had
their uses, none have really met my demands for usability. The touch
comes closest, with its built-in WiFi and growing list of applications
available from Apple's App Store, but in the end, I would hate to have
to, for example, type this article on a touch or an iPhone. I've tried
adding keyboards to PDAs, but I never wanted to stick with them over
time.
- Apple's MacBook Air -
very usable, light - though with its 13" form factor, not as portable
as I might like. But its $1,800 to $2,500 price point is far from my
definition of affordable. I would have to say the same about similar
light Windows laptops from the likes of Toshiba, Lenovo, and, most
recently, Dell.
- A secondhand 12" PowerBook G4:
Pretty portable, pretty capable, reasonably affordable - perhaps the
best combination of portability, capability, and affordability I'd
found up until now.
Netbooks
The biggest growth in personal computer sales in 2008 (perhaps the
only area with real growth in the past year or so) has been in netbooks
- a new category of small size (typically 10" screens or smaller),
low-powered (currently most sport a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, a
single-core model built for efficient battery use), and low-cost (most
models are priced somewhere around the $400 [$500 Canadian], in many
cases quite a bit below this price point).
Netbooks were first offered by several lesser-known brands like
Asus, Acer, and MSI. More recently, better known PC manufacturers,
including HP, Toshiba, and Dell, have jumped on the netbook
bandwagon.
No Mac Netbook Yet
Apple, though, has remained aloof. In an October 2008 media
conference call discussing Apple's 4th quarter financial statement,
Steve Jobs suggested that Apple's "entrant into that category
. . . is the iPhone, for browsing the Internet, and doing
email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do." He added,
"We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk,
and our DNA will not let us ship that."
With Apple claiming disinterest in the netbook
category, there's been a growth of interest in turning an existing
netbook into the Apple-netbook-that-isn't. Popular website Boing Boing,
has published a Mac
OS X on Netbook compatibility chart showing the extent various
models' hardware can be made to work with OS X and including links
to OS X installation guides for each model.
(Reportedly, installing OS X onto non-Apple hardware is not easy. It
is in violation of the OS X license agreement. So far, I haven't
tried it, so please don't email me asking for how-to advice.)
Dell's Very Affordable Netbook
When I got an email from Dell offering sale pricing on its
Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, I decided to give it a try. The listed
model was C$349 (about US$285), which seemed affordable enough. (Unlike
Apple, Dell's pricing changes seemingly randomly, with varying prices
advertised online, in newspaper ads, email promotions, and more.)
The Mini 9, which is among the systems Boing Boing listed with the
best OS X compatibility, has a 9" (actually 8.9") screen; Dell
also has 10" and 12" models. Like most netbooks, it has a 1024 x 768
pixel screen resolution. Dell offers models with 4 GB, 8 GB,
or 16 GB solid state drives (SSDs), as well as various size traditional
hard drives.
Dell's
Minis can be ordered with a Dell-customized version of Ubuntu 8.04
Linux or with Windows XP Home - the Ubuntu versions come with either
512 MB or 2 GB RAM, the XP version comes with 1 GB memory.
(Apparently, Microsoft is offering deep discounts to netbook
manufacturers to install XP Home, but the license limits the
manufacturers to 1 GB of memory). Memory is very easily accessed
for upgrading; the single memory slots uses readily available,
inexpensive DDR2 memory and supports 2 GB.
There are 3 USB 2.0 ports, sound in and out, an SD memory card port,
ethernet, and a VGA-style video out port. 802.11g WiFi is built-in;
Bluetooth and various webcams are optional extras. The 4-cell battery
delivers about 4 hours life. The whole thing weighs in at 2.28 lb.
Like most other netbooks (and Apple's MacBook Air), there's no
built-in optical drive.
Cheaper with Windows?!?
The special I went for included a 16 GB SSD, 1 GB memory, and
Windows XP Home. Ironically, Dell's sale pricing was less expensive
than their model with the free Ubuntu operating system and minimalist
4 GB SSD and 512 MB memory. I passed on Dell's various added-cost
options: different colour back panels, Bluetooth, webcam, antivirus,
and other software. (Microsoft Works and a trial version of Norton
Security Suite were included.)
While I usually recommend that laptop owners - whether Mac or other
- always buy the manufacturer's extended warranty, I didn't bother on
this one. If a $350 system breaks down, it's not a big loss.
Solid State Drives
A word about solid state drives compared to traditional models.
Netbooks are available with traditional hard drives with sizes as large
as 160 GB; I opted for a much smaller SSD. Traditional hard drives in
netbooks are slower 4200 rpm models; solid state drives offer faster
start up times. (There's a YouTube video clip
showing a MacBook Air with a standard hard drive vs. a Dell Mini 9 with
an SSD, both running OS X Leopard; the SD-equipped Dell Mini starts up
much faster despite its much less powerful CPU.) Moreover, SSDs
are much more robust, important since netbooks are likely to get
bounced around a lot.
Do I really want to store vast amounts of pictures, music, video,
and other files on a netbook? It's not intended to be a user's only (or
even main) computer system. An SSD-equipped netbook makes more sense to
me.
The 4 GB SSD Dell offers on its lowest-end models is too small to be
practical, however. It will hold Ubuntu and a basic set of
applications, but it's a tight squeeze. The 8 GB drive is better,
but I prefer that the 16 GB SSD that came on my system. 32 GB SSDs are
available, but they are out of stock everywhere I've looked. (Note that
SSDs don't seem to be standardized; an SSD for, for instance, an Asus
netbook isn't compatible with the Dell Mini.)
The SD memory card slot makes a handy way to expand storage; I got a
16 GB SD card ($40 on sale) and have loaded it up with music, video,
and e-book files.
Going Ubuntu
I also installed Ubuntu; at first, I set the system to dual-boot
between the preinstalled XP Home and Ubuntu - the 16 GB drive had
enough room for both operating systems, but there wasn't much free
space. After a week, wanting to test out the just-released Ubuntu 9.04
beta, I erased the whole thing and devoted all the space to that new
Ubuntu version. It's not Mac OS X, but I like it a lot.
(How to install a new operating system on a computer with no optical
drive? Ubuntu has a nice USB Startup Disc Creator option, which will
take let you create a bootable USB memory stick from an ISO disc image
file.)
Very Happy with It
I've been using this netbook as my primary computer for the past
couple of weeks and have been pretty happy with it. With an 88% of
full-size keyboard, typing is more awkward than on a full-sized
keyboard, especially since Dell has chosen nonstandard locations for
several keys, such as the apostrophe/quotation mark key. However, it's
far and away superior to trying to type on a Blackberry or iPhone - I'm
using it for this 1,000+ word article, for instance, something that I
dare anyone to try on a smartphone.
The 1024 x 600 screen is less deep than is common and cuts off the
bottom of some Ubuntu dialogue boxes. It requires a bit more scrolling
to read long web pages and other documents. Turning off toolbars (etc.)
helps some.
With the addition of the SD card, it has more storage than my iPod
touch, and it is arguably as usable as a media player and e-book reader
(though admittedly it won't fit in a pocket). No built-in GPS, but
neither does my 1G iPod touch. (And it cost about as much as the
touch!) Ubuntu has more applications - and more useful applications -
than the touch or iPhone, though probably fewer games.
Not a 'Piece of Junk'
In his October 2008 phone conference, Steve Jobs implied that all
$500 netbooks were "pieces of junk"; certainly, my US$285 Dell Mini 9
is not as slick a piece of hardware as a MacBook Air - it lacks that
model's sculpted aluminum solidity and ultra-thin profile. On the other
hand, its styling is reasonably clean and straightforward, it's much
smaller and more easily toted around than the Air, and includes
built-in wired networking, multiple USB ports, video out, and an SD
card slot - all missing from the Air.
I could buy a bunch of them for the price of the base MacBook
Air.
Recently, Dell released a new laptop model, Adamo,
designed to be a stylish competitor to the MacBook Air - and priced to
match. I suspect, given the tight economy, that it won't be a brisk
seller. While Apple won't be losing any sleep over the Adamo, they
ought to be taking a close look at the Dell Minis and other netbooks.
These show that it is possible to make a sub-$500 computer that
isn't a piece of junk. (And with some effort, it apparently will even
run OS X.) The Ubuntu-powered Dell Mini 9 is the best combination
of portability, affordability, and usability I've found to date - it
easily meets 80% of my computing needs.
Maybe my next low-end Mac will be a Dell netbook!
