Cheap laptops are everywhere
I have said it before and I’m sure I will say it again, the only distinguishing features the increasingly large crop of mini-notebooks have over their "normal" laptop cousins are size and price. Let’s face it, mini-notebooks are just laptops with lots of the same features as their bigger siblings, albeit often lesser capable. The mad rush from folks like Asus to keep making mini-notebooks bigger and bigger remove one of the those features, size. The bigger the mini-notebook, the more like the bigger laptops they compete with. Along with making those minis bigger we are finding higher and higher pricing creeping into the mix. Remove feature advantage #2 I mentioned. That leaves you with a mini-notebook that is not much smaller and not much cheaper than the bigger laptops on the market. Niche removed.
Don’t believe me that there are many cheap laptops available that can compete with (and outperform) these larger minis? Here’s a quick look around the laptopscape this morning:
Best Buy
Compaq Presario- Dual core AMD, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, Vista. $499.
Circuit City
Acer Extensa- Dual core Intel, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD, Vista. $479.
Dell
Inspiron- Intel Celeron, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD, Vista. $499.
Newegg
Toshiba- Intel Dual core, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, Vista. $549.
These are 4 full-sized laptops with good specifications that are cheaper than $600. I found these with only five minutes of searching and from major retailers. Sure, they are not as small nor as light as even the bigger mini-notebooks but they can run rings around them as a rule. So as minis get bigger they start to compete with these cheap laptops. The market may just shrink smaller as a result.
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Exactly my thoughts. The latest offerings from Asus, Acer, and others are dangerously close to no-niche line in both of your criteria. I personally think the maximum they can go is $500 and 3 lbs. It may also open up an opportunity for UMPC manufacturers. How about $499, 1.5lbs Q1 Ultra? I think it will do fairly well in the market.
these articles are getting stupider & stupider. anyone who thinks a 10″ 3lb laptop & 15″ 7lb+ are getting close to “competing” against eachother is a moron. and this goes for JK or any other blogger who cant think for themselves & is jumping on the criticize-ASUS-bandwagon.
is there anything bloggers WONT write to generate ad revenue (negative articles make more money than positive articles)?
ld, you may not believe, but they are actually competing products. Sub-notebook is a new genre created thanks to price and size. Purchasing such niche products takes justification, and I see lots of people having problem getting a underpowered small laptop when they can buy much more powerful ones for the same price. This doesn’t apply to geeks like us who purchase whatever looks interesting, but for majority of others, the needs for sub-notebooks are not even established yet. They need to learn that sub-notebooks can function as a supplement to a main one, and when their price goes over that of the main ones, sub-notebooks lose the merits. We already saw this in UMPC market, didn’t we?
i agree that these articles are getting pretty ridiculous. whenever i come to a so-called mobile professional site & see an article basically claiming “why not just buy a 17″ laptop for the same price and ge a dual core CPU dude!!!”. it reminds me of reading bonehead comments on Engadget articles, or well reminds me why i DONT read it anymore. in you guys efforts to get more eyeballs with negative articles to generate more ad revenue it will make you lose loyal readers as well.
especially now after you’ve repeated the samething 40-50 times, enough is enough & we fully understand your political popularized make-me-more-money stance on the “issue”.
Perhaps I am as big a moron as ld indicates but this was not a negative nor bashing article in any way. It simply stated a fact that as pricing gets closer there are many who will go with the more powerful, even if a bit bigger as I stated in the post. To make a jump that this was a negative article for the purpose of generating ad revenue is simply ridiculous. I am just stating the way it is, like it or not.
Whoa there! I’m not sure where all of this ‘ about generating more money from negative posts’ thing came from, and as a long time reader I’d like to say that countTEG doesn’t speak for me!
Now, regarding the post, I think James’ post echoes my own. As an owner of the original ASUS EEE701, price as well as the size and portablility was a major factor in getting one. For the price, the asus was a great impulse buy, and only had smartphones and PDA’s to compete with. However, with the new crop of netbooks, the prices are such now that its not such an impulse buy, and thus considerations such as value for money have to be considered. I mean, at some of the new netbook prices, one could get a ‘real’ laptop, and there are a whole lot of them. All we need is to look at how well UMPCs have done to see that regular consumers are very sensitive to price, especially when you’re bringing something new into the market.
I wouldn’t worry about id James – he’s obviously just a bit cranky this morning.
One thing I did notice is the specs on that Inspiron. That’s a dreadful waste of money and I can’t believe that they would release a mid-2006 spec laptop with Vista in mid-2008.
Sub-notebook enthusiasts have endured high prices for years. It wasn’t too long ago that many of us were shelling out 4 times the cost of the new MSI wind to get a Fujitsu p7120. Now we can get a competitive machine at “budget notebook” prices. It’s a big win for us, but it’s also a big win for budget-minded shopper who will finally have more choices in form factors at the same price level.
Moreover, even if you eliminate price and size/weight, many of the new crop of sub-notebooks are still appealing to me because they were designed with:
* better battery life in mind
* cooler operation in mind
* full Linux support in mind
Any laptop which delivers those features and a compact form is a big win to me, even at much higher prices.
Not everyone carries their “mobile” computer around. so for those, price is a large part of the consideration. Hence the two are clearly in competition. For those who are truly mobile, I would tend to agree they do not compete. No matter how cheap, I’ll never buy another 7lb notebook as I carry my computer everywhere. But for those who just put it on their lap in the living room with perhaps an occasional cross town journey, the weight won’t be as big of a deal. There are many segments of the market.
As “Back to school” nears, I’m sure the deluge of “cheap notebooks” will continue. Didn’t we just have “end of school”?! Geez, we did, but the back to school onslaught isn’t that far away i’d wager.
Wow cranky people in the blogosphere indeed. I did not see this article as negative, nor would I malign a blogger for wanting to make some money. Very few of us do, more power to the few that can. The truth is mobile computing in all forms is getting very inexpensive (Thank you China Inc.)and at a time where the economy is struggling to stay on this side of a recession and inflation is happening all over, it could not have happened at a better time.
Truly a young technologist or business person can now buy a pretty powerful and portable computer for not much of a dent in the wallet. A very good thing no matter size computer one chooses.
They still need to come down in price these big retailers.
To many people that are laid off and don’t have loads of funds to spend to get thier kids a laptop