The netbook idea worked fine for me! (And my current portable is an old Thinkpad X60, which might as well be a netbook.) As far as I could tell the low-end market just got sucked into tablets when the iPad came out. Maybe the economics will work out a bit better now that the tablet hype is over and we've gone through another couple of transistor doublings.

Apple was also better at making a low-end simple application-like computing device than assorted OEMs and Microsoft ever were.

Looking back, it's obvious that Microsoft dropped the ball on that one. They could have made iWindows for people willing to sacrifice power, flexibility and freedom for mobility, reliability and ease-of-use.

Which makes me wonder why Ubuntu didn't take off on netbooks back then. Even today, this market segment seems perfect for desktop Linux, but nobody is enthusiastic about shipping it.

Well, Ubuntu's basically Windows if you squint. iOS and Android are very different compared to both.

I'm typing this on an original Asus EEEPC netbook, expanded the DRAM to 2GB but still works well for me.

I had an Eee 1000H for years - it was great! But the SSD eventually wore out, and by that point they were no longer selling netbooks.

I think the chromebooks have shown that ARM is perfectly serviceable in a low end laptop... I really like the smaller form factor, but really need more speed... x86 VMs are unfortunately an essential requirement for work.