Netbook resellers saw 30% return rate
Netbooks had a rocky start last year in some markets, Intel’s marketing chief said at the Intel investor meeting Tuesday. At the investor meeting, Intel demonstrated on stage the performance gap between a Netbook and a mainstream notebook. In the demonstration, a Netbook and a notebook ran the same high-definition video of the NBA basketball playoffs. The video on the Atom processor-powered Netbook was jerky and dropped frames, while the Core 2 chip-based notebook’s video was smooth. The point was obvious: the Netbook’s Atom silicon falls short in performing some tasks that a mainstream notebook handles with relative ease. No one mentioned anything about the NVIDIA Ion platform though!
“In the first period–June, July, August of last year–there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (Netbooks) as notebooks,” Sean Maloney said in a question-and-answer session that was streamed over the Web. “They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there–it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster.”
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