The netbook was an inexpensive, light-weight, energy-efficient form of laptop, especially suited for wireless communication and Internet access.
Netbooks first became commercially available around 2008, weighing under 1 kg, with a display size of under 9". The name netbook (with net short for Internet) is used as "the device excels in web-based computing performance".
Netbooks were initially sold with light-weight variants of the Linux operating system, although later versions often have the Windows XP or Windows 7 operating systems. The term "netbook" is largely obsolete, although machines that would have once been called netbooks—small, inexpensive, and low powered—never ceased being sold, in particular the smaller Chromebook models.