An unfamiliar brand name sits atop the Amazon.com bestseller list for notebook computers. This hourly-updated popularity contest has recently been dominated by Taiwan's Asus rather than Silicon Valley's Apple. Five of the top 10 at one point this week were Asus machines, compared with three Apples, one Toshiba and one Hewlett-Packard unit.

Unlike the sleek, powerful $1,000-plus (€676, £503) MacBooks, the Asus notebooks were $300-$400 variations on a basic laptop model called the Eee. It has a feeble processor, a small seven-inch screen and a tiny two to four gigabytes of storage. Yet the Eee is being seen as more indicative of the future of computers than the MacBook Air, the wafer-thin laptop unveiled to gasps by Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, at the Macworld trade fair this month.