Sony Says Eee PC Signals "Race To the Bottom"

Alex Dekker writes "Sony's Mike Abary says in an interview, 'If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.' Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. And he's not going to be too pleased when he sees the Linux-powered, sub-$200 Elonex One. Looks like what's bad for Sony may be good for the consumer." The CNet article mentions that a version of the Eee running XP is available in Japan now and will be coming to the US within weeks.

Comments

Re:I don't think so

[Corpuscavernosa]

I completely agree. I certainly could have gotten an equally powerful laptop for less $ but I chose to get a Mac based on style and well, I just like it. We can leave all OS discussions out, but brand loyalty and especially design drive sales, especially when we're talking about a portable machine that will be seen by the public. You gotta look cool at the coffee shop right?

Just what we need

[Sir_Sri]

More support calls from people who want to play Wow on crappy computers, and will then complain about framerates.

Don't get me wrong, cheap computers certainly have an important place. My notebook was cheap, my desktop wasn't, but I don't seriously expect to play Crysis on my laptop.

These Eeepc's are bit like cheap indian cars that have no AC, no radio and cap out at 70Km/h. They have a place: People who can't afford better and/or aren't going to need to go on highways, and people who try just make life difficult for the rest of us.

Lets think about what you at least theoretically can do with an Eeepc: You can skype, edit documents, browse the web, and play a bit of music. Sounds good to me, it's cheap enough a student (public, high school, even some university students) can carry it around with them and not be in any major trouble if it gets lost or broken as long as they use some sort usb drive backup. Want to plug in your iPod though? Not enough storage space for it to be worthwhile. Want to play nearly any game based on a franchise, not going to happen (except maybe flash?). Need to load something from CD, not going to happen.

The drive to the bottom in cost is in many ways bad for people who develop software, games or otherwise. People can go out and spend 1500 dollars on a computer and it doesn't do even basic things like play games (Intel integraged graphics!), but other people can get a very good system for 1500 bucks, that's a problem with requirements analysis and companies selling crap which consumers clearly don't understand and it just alienates them from the whole process. If you start cutting away at storage space, memory etc... you start to seriously limit what we can allow consumers to do. How many years after DVD's were in every new machine sold did software developers have to keep selling stuff on CD (and waste that corresponding money) so they didn't get support calls from the 1% of users who think the machine they bought in 2002 should still run everything fine? What good is an 8GiB iPod when your computer only has 4 GiB of disk space? What do we do for all those people that openoffice simply doesn't cut it for (esspecially relatively sophisticated excel spreadsheets don't work well in OO)?

If anything we should be making sensible moves in the other direction: Computers that (may) cost more but aren't crap, which then can synchronize with these little sub-notebooks so that the kids can have something to take to school with relatively little risk. But actually using these as a primary machine is best limited to those who really cannot afford anything else, and even then as others have stated above, there are probably better deals.

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Oktober Sunset]

There are certainly no original jokes.