The Future of Subnotebook Pricing

Corpuscavernosa recommends a story from InternetNews about the development of the subnotebook market. The author notes the beginnings of a trend toward selling the devices bundled with certain services rather than as standalone products. He notes two examples; a free Asus Eee PC with a broadband package, and another for opening a bank account. Quoting: "Soon, the market will be overwhelmed by what I like to call 'mini me too' laptops -- commodity Asus clones that will drive margins for all players toward zero. There will be no real money to be made in direct sales of cheap mini-notebooks to consumers. I'm predicting that the successful pricing model for 'mini me too' laptops will look nothing like the notebook pricing model (where you always pay full price for the hardware), and a lot like the cell phone pricing model where you buy a service, and the hardware is heavily subsidized or given away free."

Comments

Re:Calculator Redux?

[poetmatt]

Short answer: I would agree with you that we are.

Long answer:

The article is completely off with its "There will be no real money to be made in direct sales of cheap mini-notebooks to consumers. " statement. Tell that to every business who has taken a smaller per-item profit to dynamically increase revenue via volume.

It's the truth of all business and a continually evolving economy and the technology underlying: building something expensive, make it cheaper, sell tons, build something better to replace it.

Once this occurs and computers/laptops/asus eee equivalents get to be in the range of "absolutely anyone can afford one for a decent one", everyone will have one just like how everyone can afford a cellphone nowadays.