What replaced netbooks, and what do those cost in 2026?
No major brand has sold a machine called a netbook since 2013. The label left store shelves with the last Asus Eee PC, and three categories absorbed the work netbooks used to do.
Chromebooks took the cheap laptop slot. PCWorld's Chromebook buying guide, updated August 28, 2026, puts mid-range models in the "$400 to $600 range" and picks the Asus Chromebook CX15 for anyone who needs a laptop "for under $200". PCWorld associate editor Ashley Biancuzzo calls that machine "extremely inexpensive" in the same 2026 guide.
Low-cost Windows laptops took the second slot. They ship with full-size screens and the same class of budget processor a netbook used, but without the licensing cap that once dictated how much screen and memory a cheap Windows machine was allowed to have.
Tablets took the third. Reading, video and email, which is most of what people actually did on a netbook, moved to a tablet or a phone after 2010. What no 2026 machine sells is the shape itself: a clamshell small enough to hold in one hand, built to cost less than anything else with a keyboard.
What did the Asus Eee PC cost at launch in 2007?
The category began with one machine and one price list. Asus set United States pricing for the Eee PC at the end of October 2007: three models at $299.99, $349.99 and $399.99, which TechSpot published from the information Asus had given its resellers. Those were the 2G Surf, the 4G Surf and the 4G.
Only the top model shipped first. Newegg began selling the 4G at $399.99 in the last days of October 2007, ahead of the November 1 date Asus had given, and the two cheaper models had no US release date yet. The $199 machine Asus had shown at Computex in June 2007 never appeared on that American list at all.
The price is the entire reason it sold. Asus got there by shipping Linux rather than Windows and by keeping the screen and the storage small, which is why the first Eee PC had a solid-state drive measured in single-digit gigabytes. Anyone who wanted a computer that small before 2007 was carrying a BlackBerry or one of the last PDAs like the Palm Pilot, and neither one had a real keyboard and a desktop browser.
Why did Microsoft keep Windows XP alive for netbooks?
Netbooks arrived while Microsoft was pushing Windows Vista, and Vista would not run on hardware that cheap. Linux shipped on the first Eee PC instead. That was the part that worried Microsoft: a new PC category selling well with no Windows license attached to it.
So Microsoft extended Windows XP for what it called ultra low-cost PCs, and fenced the offer in. Engadget reported the terms on May 10, 2008. A machine qualified only with a screen no larger than 10.2 inches, no more than 80GB of storage, no more than 1GB of RAM, a processor no faster than 1GHz, and no touchscreen. Engadget put the license itself at $26 in developing nations and $32 everywhere else.
Those limits existed to stop cheap XP machines from eating Vista sales, and they froze the netbook in place. A netbook could not grow a bigger screen or more memory without losing its cheap copy of Windows, so the category shipped near-identical machines year after year while ordinary laptops kept getting better and cheaper.
How big did the netbook boom get before it broke?
Big, and fast. ABI Research put worldwide netbook shipments at 38.8 million units in 2010, roughly 10 percent above the 2009 total, as The Register reported in October 2011. That was the high-water mark, and nothing after it went up.
The fall started immediately. ABI was forecasting only about 32 million netbooks for 2011, a 17.5 percent drop on that 38.8 million. Shipments went from 8.4 million units in the first quarter of 2011 to 7.3 million in the second, down 13.1 percent in three months.
Tablets passed netbooks inside the same quarter. ABI counted 13.6 million tablets shipped in the second quarter of 2011 against those 7.3 million netbooks. Jeff Orr, ABI's consumer research chief, forecast that netbook shipments would "fall year on year from 2011 through 2016", which is close to what happened, except that the category did not last that long.
Intel felt it on the income statement. Revenue from its Atom line, the small low-power processor that made a $299.99 laptop possible in the first place, fell 32 percent year on year to $269 million in the third quarter of 2011, The Register noted in the same report.
What killed netbooks: tablets, Ultrabooks, or Intel?
All three pushed, and the category took about two years to go. Tablets took the browsing and the video. Full-size budget laptops took everyone who had bought a netbook as a cheap main computer and then resented the 10.2-inch screen. Intel, meanwhile, was telling PC makers to build Ultrabooks, thin full-size laptops aimed at the MacBook Air, which is where the engineering attention and the marketing money went instead.
The ending was administrative rather than dramatic. By December 2012, The Register reported, Acer and Asus were the last two companies still building netbooks, and both were on the way out: Asus had announced in September 2012 that it would discontinue the Eee PC line by the end of the year, and Acer said it had no plans for further netbook products. DigiTimes, which The Register cited, said the two were mostly shipping the remaining machines to emerging markets.
Retailers finished the job in 2013 by liquidating what was left in the channel. Five years after that first Asus price list, there was nothing new to buy, and no manufacturer has used the word netbook on a flagship product since.
Where to find one today. Netbooks were treated as disposable and most went to recycling, so condition decides the price: nearly every surviving unit has a dead battery, and the storage drive is too small for any current operating system. Collectors who want the original 7-inch machine rather than a later 10-inch model pay a premium for a boxed one. Sellers list them among Etsy's Asus Eee PC listings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did netbooks fail?
Netbooks failed because the rules that made them cheap also stopped them from improving. Microsoft's ultra low-cost PC terms for Windows XP, reported by Engadget in May 2008, capped a qualifying netbook at a 10.2-inch screen, 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz processor. Once tablets and full-size budget laptops caught up in 2011, buyers had no reason to keep accepting the compromise, and shipments fell 13.1 percent between the first and second quarters of that year.
What happened to the Asus Eee PC?
The Asus Eee PC created the netbook category in October 2007 at United States prices of $299.99, $349.99 and $399.99. Asus sold the line for five years and then retired it: the company announced in September 2012 that the Eee PC would be discontinued by the end of that year, as The Register reported in December 2012, and no new Eee PC has been sold since. Acer, the only other company still building netbooks at that point, left the market at the same time.
Is a netbook the same as a Chromebook?
No. A netbook was a small Windows XP or Linux laptop sold between 2007 and 2013, built around Intel's low-power Atom processor and limited by Microsoft's licensing rules to a 10.2-inch screen and 1GB of RAM. A Chromebook runs Google's ChromeOS, comes in normal laptop sizes, and is still sold in 2026, with budget models under $200 and mid-range models in the $400 to $600 range according to PCWorld's August 2026 guide.