Michael Dell: Netbooks only good for 36 hours

Michael Dell, founder & CEO of Dell Computers, has been damning in his opinion of the netbook experience. Talking in San Francisco at Churchill Club, he was trying to convince his audience that consumers prefer high-end PC devices rather than low-cost netbooks.

“If you take a user who’s used to a 14- or 15-inch notebook and you say ‘Here’s a 10-inch netbook,’ they’re gonna say ‘Hey, this is so fantastic. It’s so cute. It’s so light. I love it,” Dell said. “But about 36-hours later, they’re saying ‘The screen’s gonna have to go. Give me my 15-inch screen back.'”

But his criticisms didn’t stop there. “We see a fair amount of customers not really being that satisfied with the smaller screen and the lower performance – unless it’s like a secondary machine or it’s a very first machine and the expectations are low,” he said. “But as a replacement machine for an experienced user, it’s not what we’d recommend. It’s not a good experience, and we don’t see users very happy with those.”

It’s strange that he’s taking a dig at the form-factor given the successful sales of the Mini 10 and Mini 10v netbooks. To be fair, I don’t know of many people that use a netbook as a primary computing device. Even I use a 14” Lenovo laptop as my main blogging tool. However, netbooks have much better battery life and also the portability factor that most laptops can’t match.

Via GigaOm.