Did you hear about the new Hilton NanoSuites? You get a single bed in a room about the size of a big closet — and no shower.
There, you can dine on McDonald’s new McSliders: burgers the size of an espresso cup, with two drops of ketchup.
You might wash those down with a Coke Swigger — noncarbonated cola in a can a quarter of the normal size.
What’s that you say? Those are ridiculous, deeply compromised concepts that would bomb in the marketplace? Well, of course they are; I made them up.
The popularity of netbooks, on the other hand, is real.
A netbook is a laptop with a shrunken screen, an undersized keyboard and a processor that is so slow, you would have laughed at it in 2007. The netbooks’ main attractions are tiny dimensions, light weight and low cost, usually $350 to $500. Otherwise, they offer not a single attractive feature — only less bad compromises.
The term “netbook” is a euphemism, intended to stress what these micro-notebooks are good for: e-mail, Web browsing, chat, Skype and word processing. The hope is to distract you from what they are too feeble to do well: Photoshop, video editing, games and so on.
But these days, price and size are enough to make netbooks a hot seller; ABI Research estimates that we’ll buy 35 million of them worldwide this year, and 139 million in 2013.
It wasn’t always this way. When netbooks were introduced a couple of years ago, they were so tiny, only spider monkeys would have found them usable. But as they have inched up in size and usability — from screen with a diagonal of 8.5 inches, or 22 centimeters, to 10-inchers, from keyboards 85 percent of normal size to 93 percent, from smallish solid-state drives to regular hard drives — their sales have…