Doom and gloom aside, this is probably one of those situations where a tech product dies without literally vanishing from the earth.

There is still room, mainly in emerging markets, for low-performance laptops with small screens and sub-$300 prices, even if the overall market is evaporating. Someone's got to stick around to sell those netbooks even as other companies move on to tablets and hybrids; it might as well be Acer. But if emerging markets are the only place where netbooks can survive, you might as well consider them dead everywhere else.

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