Out of the Netbook craze, a new category was born: the Nettop. The Nettop is supposed to be  the desktop equivalent of a Netbook, being inexpensive and small. It’s not a bad idea, but I agree with the author of this OSNews article that they are a bit over hyped, but for a different reason.

Netbooks were revolutionary in that they were both small and cheap, but their price alone is not the main reason they are so attractive. An average netbook usually costs between $300 and $400, while a standard notebook starts at about $400 and up. In other words, the price difference is something between $0 and $100, $200 at the most. While that is increasingly becoming a very noticeable difference, the usually inferior specs and, thus, often shorter lifetime mean that netbooks can’t quite compete without something else going for them. That something else is, of course, size. Having a portable, extremely small computer has a lot of value on its own. When you add in $50 to $100 of savings, the deal changes from being just attractive to being irresistible for many people.

Nettops don’t have this advantage. While there are exceptions, most people don’t care about slicing every inch off the size of their desktop computer, if they even have a desktop computer. Plus, the price savings get squeezed even more with low-end (yet usable) desktops hitting the $300 mark.

Without the size advantage and with further squeezed price savings, nettops just don’t have a lot to stand on.

Really their only hope is to make their small size valuable with software. If a nettop shipped with home-theatre aimed software, it might have a better chance, since there the size is of significant value. Without some differentiation along these lines, nettops really have little chance, it seems.

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