A laptop seems to be part of everyone's personal electronics tool belt these days, but exactly which portable computers are sticking around for the long haul? Dell recently announced that they're about to stop producing their line of netbooks--those cheap micro-computers that started soaring in popularity just a few years ago. They're still available from plenty of other manufacturers, but does Dell's choice to discontinue the Inspiron minis indicate a trend away from the netbook?

It sort of depends on what you mean by netbook, I guess. The traditional model--the kind you see people using the most in coffee shops and on trains--features a low-resolution, ten-inch screen and an Intel Atom processor. There's no CD drive and probably no media card reader. It's simply a little machine that opens up and connects to the internet--perfect for email, social media, and running basic programs, like a word processor. Gaming types have never laid hands on a netbook, nor has anyone who's ever needed to get real graphics work done on their laptops. They were aimed at college students and other folks who needed basic computing on a budget.

And the prices for these little dudes did get real low. We're talking under $300 for a fully functional computer running Windows 7. But this was back when the cheapest tablet computer was about twice that price. Now, with machines like the Kindle Fire running even lower than that, the basic netbook craze does seem more or less obsolete. After all, if you only need a computer for basic internet utilities, you might as well just use the smartphone that you probably have already. They're getting cheaper and cheaper and most of them run web staples just fine. Those who feel the need for a higher resolution screen or a bigger hard drive could opt for a cheap tablet. The netbook seems like the awkward middle child between full-powered laptops and sleek new tablets.

That's not to say the netbook is gone in all its incarnations. While we might not see many Atom-powered computers in the future, the small, sleek laptop is probably going to stick around. Laptops with high-resolution, 11-inch screens, decent processors, and no optical drives fall somewhere between laptops and netbooks on the evolutionary chart. They're either high-powered netbooks or lightweight laptops, but either way, I don't think we're going to see them vanishing anytime soon. It's just the smallest of the small that seem to be dropping away--and I don't think most people will miss them.