War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting look at the war brewing on the inexpensive laptop front. With everything from the Eee PC to the OLPC, the trend in slimming and trimming seems to be continuing. "The market segment is so new it doesn't have a name yet or even an agreed-upon set of specifications. Intel, the chipmaker, calls the category "netbooks," recognizing that much of what people do on their laptops involves going on the Net. The new machines are also being called ultra-low-cost PCs, mininotebooks, or even mobile Internet gadgets. In appearance, they have the familiar clamshell design, but they're smaller, with seven- to 10-inch screens. They offer full keyboards (albeit with smaller keys) and weigh less than three pounds. Perhaps most important, the majority cost less than $500 - some as little as $299. Intel says it expects more than 50 million of these netbooks to be sold by 2011. It's introduced a tiny, low-power processor to run them called Atom, which puts 47 million transistors on a chip about the size of a penny."

Comments

UMPCs

[HeavensBlade23]

I was under the impression the preferred nomenclature was "UMPC". That's what I always hear them referred to as.

Re:Why so expensive?

[JustinOpinion]

For that matter, why is an XO $300? The current production cost of an XO is ~188 USD. This is how much they cost as part of the "Give one Get one" program (the other ~$200 was a charitable donation).

Why are these machines so expensive? Just because you can get specs X for $650 doesn't mean you can get specs X/2 for $325. There are all kinds of reasons (size of market, supply and demand, scaling of technology, base costs, etc.)... but the end result is that for most metrics, the "metric per dollar" vs. "cost" graph is non-linear. There is a sweet spot of lowest dollar/performance, with fringe cases (ultra-cheap or ultra-performance) having a price premium.

In the case of these ultra-portables, a significant fraction of the cost also comes from the engineering and components required to make them so small and lightweight. You can of course get a clunky 200MHz laptop for real cheap (old model off eBay, for example), but it will not be as light or slick as the Eee PC or others.

The prices will probably keep dropping. But frankly I'm amazed at how cheap these ultra-portables already are: compare the performance, size, and price to what was available even 5 years ago and see how far we've come!

Re:Licensing fees fail as price drops to $200.

[grapeape]

Umm I picked up one for my kids at Microcenter for $279 after a $100 rebate, they arent that hard to find. Its an Acer Aspire AS5315-2122, total garbage laptop but for kids its great...and it did have vista at least for an hour or so before I paved it.