Intel’s current Pine Trail platform still limits most netbooks around the 1-inch range. The new Canoe Lake platform is going to try to shave that to half the usual thickness.
Canoe Lake is an upgrade to the current Intel Atom processors to include single-core and dual core chips specifically made for netbooks. Current dual-core Atom CPUs are still made for nettops.
Once these chips are sent to netbook manufacturers, we may be seeing a lot of new models using “super-slim” or “ultra-slim” in their next netbook iteration.
Of course, there have been previous models like the Sony Vaio X that’s just 0.55 inches thin but they’re still pretty expensive.
Only problem though is that the more you shave off the size of a netbook, the lesser space you have for the battery. Otherwise, the back portion of the netbook would have ugly protrusions just to accomodate a 6-cell battery (just look at that model unit above).
Excellent blog with lots of useful information on [the apple stores]