Dell Inspiron Mini 12 Arrives: Sleek but Slow
This morning the stork dropped off one of the most highly-anticipated netbooks of the year. Everyone wanted to see and touch the Inspiron Mini 12 because it's the first netbook with a 12-inch display. How good was the keyboard? How bright was the display?
Context & Ripple Effects
Dell entered the netbook race in September 2008 when it announced plans to offer a low-cost mini-laptop join the netbook market, and the Inspiron Mini 12 is the follow-through: the first netbook to push past the category's usual 8-10 inch screens to a 12-inch display. LAPTOP Magazine's hands-on frames the central tension of Dell's netbook strategy — a bigger, sleeker chassis that still carries the category's underpowered internals.
First-order effects
- Buyers get a netbook with a 12-inch screen and (presumably) a roomier keyboard than typical 9-10 inch models, but early impressions flag sluggish performance — the size advantage comes without a speed upgrade.
- Dell extends its Mini line upmarket in screen size just months after entering the category, directly challenging rivals like ASUS and HP on display real estate rather than price alone.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face pressure to blur the netbook/ultraportable boundary — if 12-inch netbooks sell, the cheap-laptop and thin-and-light segments start cannibalizing each other, squeezing pricing across both.
- Dell's own roadmap gets pulled toward refinement over novelty: the line continues with models like the Inspiron Mini 10, iterating on the same trade-off between size, power, and price.
Third-order effects
- The 'bigger but still slow' netbook proves structurally unstable — within three years Dell exits the category entirely, declaring that 'thin and powerful is where it's at' quit netbooks as tablets and ultrabooks absorb demand.
- The episode foreshadows the industry-wide collapse of the netbook as a distinct class: screens grew toward mainstream laptops while performance stayed entry-level, leaving the category no defensible niche.
The trend: This is an early data point in the netbook boom-and-bust arc of 2008-2011, when manufacturers stretched the category until it dissolved into ultraportables and tablets.