Why your next laptop should be a netbook

One of the featured articles in this month's Wired is about the rise of netbooks, which are miniature notebook computers that mostly do one thing: get you connected to the internet.  

Which is all you really need at this point.  

From Gmail to Google Documents to Shutterfly to Youtube, almost everything you do now can be done with only a web-browser.  In today's economy, why shell out $1700 for a Macbook when you can get an HP or Dell netbook for $300 or less.  You can even run Windows XP if you want, though I'd probably just stick with Linux Ubuntu (you'll save about $25-50), since you don't need to run anything complex.

Since you'll be saving $1400 or more, you can take that money and buy a nice desktop for home use, and take the $500 netbook on travels.  Keep in mind these netbooks have very small hard drives, so you'd want to have some type of a network drive option at home (do-able considering the cost savings).

Wired has some interesting observations.  When is the last time you remember technology getting less powerful?  Netbooks are far less powerful than "mainstream" laptops.  But with the rise of cloud computing, what we've been able to do is distribute the large processing tasks to servers located thousands of miles away, so the small computer that you use doesn't need to be very powerful.