I saw a post on Engadget this morning that sort of got my bile up, specifically with Miller’s mention that a $300 Compaq laptop “seems to do an apt job at filling in that gap between netbook and laptop”. It took a while to figure out what really irked me about this, until I realized: Why do we need to fill the gap between different products?

If I see a laptop and a netbook side by side, I need to know the real differences between them besides screen size and price point. The more we drive out the wedge from between these classes, the less accurate our buying decisions can be. And that’s horrible! In a lot of retail locations that sell netbooks, there are already dozens of models with no difference between them that the average person can make out. Six or seven different Eee netbooks, Acer Aspire One models filling out the numbers, with Gateway, Toshiba and HP not far behind.

Which one am I supposed to buy again?

The smaller the gap, the less likely I am as a consumer to choose your product over someone else’s. It would be nice to see a manufacturer step up and make themselves different, for once, rather than slipping into the neat middle-market where supposedly everyone aims to buy from.