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

AMD geode

[goombah99]

If this is such a great hypothesis then why did things like the AMD geode or the recent (forgetting the name) $20/month balck box computer catch fire?

was the time just not right?

Also if you look at these mini PCs it seems like their are teirs on these. Some are low cost low power, some are higher cost higher power. when people talk about these on slashdot the conversation goes like this:

nerd 1: oooh the XO is only $100 or $200 dollars.

nerd 2: yeah but it's a dog. I could get an fluvio flivitron for only $100 more and it has a real graphics card.

etc...

so no one on slashdot is really interested in the low end machine other than to talk about it's price. (Except of course when the price-tards are trying to put down macs by claiming this or that POS is "the same" but costs less)

A panacea?

[rhiorg]

Perhaps we could build vehicles that run on subnotebook computers. It would be a cost-effective solution to our energy crisis, and could save the big 3 automakers!