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That Netbook From Verizon? “Just Like A Laptop?” Ha. Haha.
By Nick | September 7, 2009
Like 99.999 percent of the population, I toss my junk mail without ever really looking at it; but something about the promotional card that came from Verizon on Saturday caught my eye. Specifically, the text on the back, hollering in 20-point red type: “Win a netbook! Just like a laptop, only smaller and cheaper!”
Um, no.
For anyone not fully versed in techno-jargon, netbooks are ultra-small, sorta-cheap ($200-$400, as a ballpark average), and super-portable laptops designed for cruising the Internet. For a long time, they weren’t good for much else – trying to run a memory-intensive program on its low-end processor would probably make the entire unit explode in a gaudy ball of flame – but lately a few models have displayed more robust specs in the computing-power department.
Still. Insinuating to the unsuspecting user that a netbook will provide them with the same sort of capabilities they would find in a laptop – “only smaller and cheaper” – is false advertising at its finest. Of course, Verizon’s lawyers would probably march out in lockstep and declare that “Just like a laptop” was a comment on its form-factor. But imagine the customer who signs up for one of the devices, only to realize belatedly that the thing runs spreadsheets and games with all the speed of grandparents puttering their way to church on Sunday in the ol’ Buick. Not to mention the fact that, with netbooks, you typically pay a monthly fee to keep the thing connected online.
“What the hell kind of computer did we just get?” the increasingly-irate customer hollers down the phone-line to customer service, who, because they’ve received that exact same call roughly a billion times that morning, plot even more fervently to commit mass seppuku right there in the cubicle-farm.
Sorry, buddy: You’ve just been hosed.
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