Actually you can spec it with a 720P HD Screen.

...are they deliberately trying to lose money?

One of the most popular hackintosh netbooks, (nearly) every sale of which was a win for Dell and a loss for Apple. Fortunatley I got mine two months ago, and I have been completely satisfied. There's nothing better (well ok, there's loads of things better) than sticking a small light cheap Mac in your carrier bag without noticing the weight or worrying about damaging its pristine exterior. Sometimes I swear it feels faster than my C2D 2 GHz iMac. One can only imagine what Apple can do with the hardware if their OS already runs so smoothly on such a low powered device thanks to the efforts of a few hackers.

When will netbook makers understand that we need at least 1000 pixels of vertical resolution to be able to do anything remotely useful.

Even a 1440x900 is a bit low, but for a 10" would probably be just about enough.

I have a Mini 9 and it's the mutt's nuts. Favourite hack so far, enabling receiving of GPS timing on the 3G card with a bit of driver juggling, and logging it in Google Maps with Earth Bridge. It's such a handy netbook, almost small enough to be pocket sized.

These manufacturers still haven't got the message that size isn't everything :)

(The moderatrix is welcome to disagree if she wishes)

...behavior: just does not get it, hopelessly clueless. If one is forced to look at the moe expensive yet less featured 10" instead then that person will stop looking at Dell and turns to other, cheaper and more OS X-friendly brands (eg MSI Wind, Gigabyte etc.)

Dell is still just a stupid beancounter-led company, period.

""When will netbook makers understand that we need at least 1000 pixels of vertical resolution to be able to do anything remotely useful."""

Speak for yourself. I like my Dell Mini 9, but I get the majority of my work done on a old Dell Inspiron 4100 notebook running a whopping 1024x768. That with 1.13ghz P-3 processor and 512MB of ram. It's quite fast enough, too. Plenty of screen realistate. This is used for writing a shitty ton worth of documentation and doing software testing. I have more powerful machines that I remote into for tasks like virtualization and whatnot.

If you need to have a 1900x1080 resolution and 4GB of RAM to do anything useful.. whatever your doing, your doing it wrong. Unless your a graphics artist or CAD worker or something.

I mean.. seriously.. do you have your screen filled up with 800 pixels worth of toolbars or something?

It's too bad. Dell Mini 9 worked great for Linux, too. The Mini 10 and 12, as far as I can tell, require the proprietary Poulsbo driver for the GMA 500 graphics. Which sucks.

I disagree. I can do pretty much everything I want to do with 1024 x 768. That's four xterms plus screen furniture, and until recently it was the biggest screen I'd ever used.

1024 x 576 is a bit stingy, but I'm a bit stingy, too. I'd rather make do with 1024 x 576 than pay more.

"If you need to have a 1900x1080 resolution and 4GB of RAM to do anything useful.. whatever your doing, your doing it wrong."

I run Visual Studio. It has panels on the left, the right, the bottom, a tab bar at the top... I need my pixels. I've got a laptop with a 13" screen (not sure what res, but it's whatever is native at that size) and it's too damn small to do anything without going insane. Yes, I could collapse the panels but then that is a ruddy pain in itself.

I cant remember how many calls we had for replacement motherboards and power supplies that we couldnt honour as the the manufacturer couldnt get stock for their own products,but we had alot of disgruntled customers being passed over to us from Dell support,if thats what you can call it.

Well if you ever need to know what the wheather is like in India just call Dell, thats about the only sense you wil get from them these days.

It's not official yet, but check the Dell Mini site,

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/mac-os-x/

and you can learn that more and more of the gotchas for the 10v are being solved. It will likely be Hackintosh friendly soon enough.

I was just about to order the Mini 9, but then they pulled the plug.

Shame about the 10V screen size. I won't be getting one.

Remember the story from a few days ago, M$ want netbooks to have a 10" maximum screen size? Perhaps it's also the minimum...

I'm very happy with my Mini 9, it runs OSX 10.5.7 much faster than it ever ran XP.

Replacing the Mini-9 with something that doesn't have bluetooth, can't take extra RAM cos it's soldered in and requires some fudging with graphcs drivers for other operating systems.

I have a Mini 9. It has revolutionised by computing due to its low cost, high quality chassis, small size, excellent battery life and Linux friendliness. Fab machine.

Fair enough, but anyone who's running Visual Studio completely misses the point of a NETbook (I see you aren't, but that's the subject of the article). And besides, wouldn't you need a magnifying glass to read anything from a 10" screen with 1080 vertical pixels?

Anyway, next they will be killing the 10" and tellings you that the 12" is so much better. Actually, why not just do 14", 15"... See? Bigger keyboard too!

I am using the MSI Wind, running dual boot XP/OSX. I have had it pretty much since the moment it was released last July, and I like it a lot. (I spent 80% of my time in OSX. It is impressive just how well Apple's latest OS runs on low powered computers not designed for it). Interestingly enough, two friends of mine have recently played with my Wind for a bit and ended up buying the same machine for themselves. I would probably get the NC-10 form myself if I was buying now and I suggested this for them, but they both reacted with "We like the one you have", which I couldn't really argue with.

I have no problem browsing and doing office apps on the 600 line screen. Still, I would pay extra for more pixels. I think Dell is offering a version of the mini 10 with a 768 line screen. I really want to see this become standard on 10 inch netbooks.

Some of the commenters here are confused because Dell has two very different 10-inch netbooks with similar names. The Mini 10 is the one that can be ordered with a 720p screen, has soldered-in memory and the Poulsbo chipset. The Mini 10v is, architecturally, nearly identical to the Mini 9 - Atom 270, 945GSE chipset, socketed memory. The screen indeed is 576 pixels high, no option to change that. Accessing the second memory slot requires removing the motherboard, which is annoying but not impossible. (My old IBM T42 did the same.)

As a Mini 9 owner, I have been very happy with it and the 9" form factor. I would not want it any larger. However, it does seem that the public thinks bigger is better...

i dont know whats more stupid you running visual studios on a netbook or complaining about it on here

If you don't understand what all those vertical pixels are for, then obviously you've never used OSX : -) It isn't exactly the most screen-space thrifty GUI out there.

For all of you wondering why netbook makers don't offer higher res screens... They're probably very concerned that would cut into their sales of much more expensive (and higher margin) machines. They've got to handicap netbooks, since many people will realize that their email / web use can easily be accomplished on a $400 machine as opposed to a $1200 one.

Personally I think that 1280x768 is the minimum that I can really use on a laptop, since I tend to have lots of stuff going on at one time. And I need to spread out over 6-10 workspaces to avoid feeling cramped. My real monitors are in storage right now, and I've got to use a 1080p TV for my desktop right now (1920x1080) and even that feels a little small for me most of the time. For reference I've got 2 2304x1440 displays that I normally use, with multiple workspaces, and it's quite roomy.

So far as I can tell the ideal laptop screen at the moment is the 1440x900 12" you can get on the Lenovo x200. I just wish Fujitsu would ship one, since I like /everything/ else about their ultra portables better than the Thinkpads.

We know that decent screens can be made, since Fujitsu's U820 (not a terribly nice machine over all) has a 5.6" 1280x768 res screen. Now we just need to take that pixel density and expand it out to 9 or 10 inches and we'll be all set.

Why do people want to run OS 10 at all? If they must, the little white Macbook is not that expensive.

at Aria.

Thanks to this post:

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/284491/dell-inspiron-mini-9-1gb-ram-8gb-hd/

I got a Mini 9 for £99 delivered back in December.

It's superb - use it every day. Dell are fools for killing it...

I believe it was going to be relaunched as the "Dell Vostro A90" black paint job higher price tag but they are also going to pull that, as for mine I love it ! although runs ball burningly hot!

"Why do people want to run OS 10 at all? If they must, the little white Macbook is not that expensive."

Are you kidding?

The Mini 9 starts at about a quarter the price of the macbook and is smaller, lighter and in general more netbook-y.

"If you don't understand what all those vertical pixels are for, then obviously you've never used OSX : -) It isn't exactly the most screen-space thrifty GUI out there."

Er, ever KDE or Gnome? They use far more screen space. Windows is no better. IMHO OSX is pretty good at maximizing use of screen space.