What happened to the Neutrino?

Sat Apr 17, 2010

I have absolutely no fucking idea.

There are reviews abound around the net of this cool little beast. There are at least two unboxing videos and various specs and product shots, and various onine stores list it1.

No stores carry them. No online stores have them in stock. There were a grand total of two listed globally on Ebay2.

OCZ's product page is, shall we say, unhelpful. The interesting bit is that they still have a press release circa 2009 that lists OCZ as a "DIY netbook solution", and contains a link to that product page I mentioned. Their DIY notebook section lists nothing, and their End Of Life products make no mention of the pint-sized hulk. There's plenty of noise on the OCZ Forum3.

That's it though. Had I not lucked out on Ebay, I wouldn't be able to get one of these, and I'm not sure why given that it doesn't seem to be discontinued.

Why the questions? I'm glad you asked. It's because this seems like such a badass idea that I have to support it. They made a netbook you could feed commodity parts. No special ram, none of this HP Mini expansion port bullshit where they try to sell you a $70 cable so that you can connect it to an external monitor, no 1.8 inch hard drives. It's all standard laptop gear, so if you're a computer nerd like me, you already have the components lying around to make it cool. The units come without RAM or HHD, but because it uses standard 2.5 inch SATA drives, you can use some standard laptop RAM and SSD and get the thing up to standard laptop performance level. It could democratize netbooks in a pretty fundamental way, and remove much of the need for traditional laptops, if people could get it.

So yeah. Here's hoping this isn't some sort of widely-spread but poorly-executed conspiracy to keep the Neutrino out of users' hands.

  1. Granted, as "out of stock", but still, it's not a ghost.↩
  2. One of those is now sitting in the Canadian customs office in Toronto, waiting to get shipped to me next week.↩
  3. Including a guide for getting OS X running on the Neutrino, which doesn't surprise me because with the right extra gear, that netbook could actually be more powerful spec-wise than my iMac desktop.↩

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