ASUS Eee PC

» see eeepc.asus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the eee pc had its turkish moment around 2008. teknosa and vatan bilgisayar both stocked the 701 within a few months of the taiwan launch, and the price was the part that mattered. somewhere around 600 turkish lira at street, which was less than a third of a regular laptop and almost half of the cheapest acer. computer engineering classmates of mine bought them as second machines, took them to lectures, kept the heavier toshiba at the dorm for the actual coursework.

asus launched the 701 on october 16 2007 in taipei. the spec sheet was almost a joke. a 7-inch 800x480 screen, a 900 mhz intel celeron m, 512 mb of ram, a 4 gb ssd, no spinning disk, no dvd, a 38 wh battery good for about three hours. xandros linux on top with a tabbed launcher that looked like a 5-year-old's first computer ui. it ran firefox 2 and openoffice. that covered most needs at the price point.

asus moved 300,000 units in the first three months. by mid-2008 it had crossed a million. by the end of 2008 the figure was about five million. then everybody copied it. acer aspire one, msi wind, samsung nc10, hp mini, lenovo s10, dell mini 9. the netbook segment had been invented in twelve months. by 2010 there were eighty different netbook skus in any istanbul electronics store, half of them sub-$300 windows xp boxes running atom processors.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

microsoft refused to let it die on linux. by the second half of 2008 asus was shipping eee pcs with windows xp pre-installed because retailers wanted the windows sticker, and microsoft was happy to extend xp's eol just to keep netbook share away from linux. the original linux ui that made the eee pc unique disappeared from the shelf almost immediately. by 2009 most eee pcs you actually saw running were xp boxes with the standard start menu, doing the same job as any other laptop, just slower.

that was the beginning of the death. once the eee pc became a small windows laptop instead of a tiny linux appliance, the only thing left was the price tag. and once the ipad shipped in april 2010, the casual-computing buyer the netbook had been built for had a better option. the netbook category did not collapse overnight, it bled out from late 2010 through 2012.

~ the long tail ~

asus formally ended eee pc production in january 2013. the last refresh shipped under the eee pc x101 brand and disappeared from retailer shelves by mid-year. the eeebook x205ta launched in 2014 as a different machine. cheap windows 8.1 with a hard drive instead of an ssd, no linux build, no 7-inch option. it sold for a while and quietly disappeared too. by 2026 the eee pc lives mostly as a retro-tech footnote, alongside the [[palm-foleo]] and the late-2000s ultraportable shelf that smartphones eventually absorbed.

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