Peak Sony subnotebook design

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jjjacer@reddit

god i miss subnotebooks, maybe not their speed but i just love the form factor

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What's the worst thing about netbooks going away was browser / website bloat along with Windows bloat that caused it.
Subnotebooks used to great for media consumption and getting online but if you were to try one on YouTube even just a couple years after the subnotebook format peaked it was awful. Even sites that should have been relatively simple like Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, and Netflix all just started getting worse and worse for the inexpensive processors you'd find in netbooks. Toss in Windows going from only a handful of background services to dozens and even about a hundred on some versions of a fresh install and that poor CPU never gets to rest killing the battery life and overall usability.
(I hung onto my Lenovo S10-2 for far too long because I liked the formfactor and loved the screen)

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recluseMeteor@reddit

Even if we took bloat away, you have to keep in mind the rise of newer and better video codecs, due to the prevalence of online video: HEVC, VP9 and AV1.

The Lenovo S10-2 you mentioned, for example, couldn't even hardware-accelerate H.264 (a “legacy” codec nowadays, but very prevalent nevertheless). Meaning that if you wanted to watch a video with such codec, the CPU would have to do all the work, leading to slowdowns, dropped frames and higher power usage.

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Interesting_Walk_747@reddit

Preaching to the choir here, I used the netbook for a lot longer than I should have after all. It was my main laptop from its launch in 2010 ish to about 2015 and I kept it around for another 5 years just for watching movies on my desk and nightstand (I encoded the movies myself to get around the weak CPU & awful GPU).
Thats not because I didn't try to replace it, there just wasn't anything that I tried or I could see out there that seemed to be the right size with the right kind of performance to satisfy me. I'd give away the replacements because they were usually too big (I needed a subnotebook sized laptop) and or too underpowered to make it worth keeping.
I had a Toshiba Click 10 at one point and Windows was such a busy little bee it would tank the battery after just a couple hours of being idle. Once Microsoft killed off Edge for their Chromium port it went from pretty useable on the internet to a complete waste of time. That PC ended up as a glorified spreadsheet reader for my sisters accountancy job.

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recluseMeteor@reddit

I understand. You were very patient with the machine too, I would say.

If you are still interested in small machines for the modern day, in case you didn't know about these, I could recommend the following:

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MishyJari@reddit

Peak, except for the hinges 💀

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Lukeno94@reddit

Yeah, I don't know what Sony did with the hinges on the SRX, but they seem to be about as good at holding the screen up as toothpaste on most of them. Which is very odd because hinges aren't a major Sony weak point on anything else I've come across.

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AustriaModerator@reddit (OP)

yes, pretty common for sony around 2000.

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DiskaCoyote@reddit

That's pretty neat lol.