Netbooks Top Amazon.com’s Best-Selling Notebook List

The tech blogosphere was atwitter yesterday over the latest top selling notebooks list from Amazon, which shows that the top 5 and indeed most of the top 10 are netbooks, rather than traditional notebooks. Our fellow bloggers wondered: does this mean that notebooks are out, and netbooks are in?

While I agree that netbooks have arrived, when I look at which systems top the list, I’m not surprised. As of this writing, the top 5 systems are:

• The Acer Aspire one ($649.83) with XP and 6-cell battery
• The MSI Wind U100 with 6-cell battery
• The Eee PC 1000H (also comes with a 6-cell battery)
• The Eee PC 900 (the only celeron-based netbook in the bunch, comes at a really low $329)
• Another 6-cell Acer Aspire one, this time in black.

Amazon.com is the Web’s best-known and trusted e-tailer. And what we see here are a bunch of netbooks — with the exception of the bargain-priced Eee PC 900 — that you just can’t get at big box retailers. Some of them, particularly, the 6-cell versions of the Aspire one and the MSI Wind, are difficult to find even at other e-tailers.

Also, none of the notebook manufacturers here (Acer, ASUS, and MSI) has an online store of its own. So while consumers who want to order a Dell notebook online will likely go directly to Dell.com, if they want an Eee PC or an Aspire one, they’ll have to look to an e-tailer like Amazon.com.

With no competition from big box retailers or even from the manufacturer’s own stores, is it any wonder that Amazon’s top-selling portable computers are all netbooks? I think this says more about the distribution channel for netbooks than lack of interest in notebooks.

(via Engadget and Cult of Mac)