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

Calculators

[grizdog]

We've seen this before, haven't we? here are many examples, but calculators went from being high-margin, high tech items that were very expensive. It wasn't long before they became commodity items that earned razor thin margins for a few low cost producers, and then a high-end developed for calculators that looked a little like computers.

Companies that can get a really good manufacturing and distribution process in place will make a lot of these things, others will wash out, and others may follow the model described in the article.

Re:Merging of notebook and cell-phone?

[Kuj0317]

I suppose that's the way we are going with blackberries and iphones. If the Eee could be used for making a phone call, it would be something like a blackberry on steroids. or... perhaps a blackberry on crack? say, a "crackberry" if you will?