Vizio Plans To Undercut The Market For All-In-One PCs

TV maker Vizio is famous for undercutting competitors' prices on LCD TVs; now, the company has released word that it will introduce a new line of budget computers, and next week will be showing them off at CES. Bloomberg reports that the company won't yet disclose actual prices (the kind with numbers), but says instead only that they will be at a "price that just doesn’t seem possible." As the article mentions, the all-in-one desktop machines shown look a lot like Apple products; BetaNews has pictures, and ominously mentions Apple's tendency to sue over similar-looking products.

Comments

Re:Good for them.

[mrclisdue]

Habitat for Humanity (dot org will resolve) often give stuff away, never mind just having $5 Pentium 4s.

They'll take donations, too.

cheers,

Trolling.. must try HARDER

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you even bother switching accounts to post in the same story?

The keyboard looks exactly like Apple's flat keyboard, and the trackpad is the Magic Trackpad that Apple started offering a year or so ago.

--it's not at all surprising that Apple is going to be proactive in protecting its design work.

But sites like Slashdot are full of Apple-haters who don't want to give the company credit for anything

bonch writes

The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad

I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs.

I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.

I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything,

Re:Good for them.

[hedwards]

I find that hard to believe an economic system like that is called communism. In order for a capitalist society to exist, at least in the type that the US is, you have winners and you have losers. Most of the winners had quite a bit to start with and most of the losers didn't have much to start with.

This whole notion of upward mobility hasn't been true in at least 40 years. Sure you get some people that manage it, but the money that would have gone to making that work out is now being siphoned directly to the richest Americans.

Re:Good for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what a zero-sum game is. Zero-sum games occur when winners win exactly what losers lose. If economics was zero-sum no growth would EVER be possible, by definition. Anything gained by expanding producers would necessarily be lost by someone else (other producers, probably).

And capitalism has no requirement that there be any losers at all. It doesn't preclude losing situations, but in a strict market capitalist system, any transaction that is KNOWN to be a losing proposition will never go forward. Every transaction that does go foward in such a system.. has no known losers. Both sides expect (and generally do) to come out in better positions than when they went in. Which is why they went into the transaction in the first place.

Marketing/PR Bulls***

[evilviper]

PCs are already rock-bottom pricing with tiny margins. Visio isn't going to be able to do anything significant. Maybe their first units will be loss-leaders to try and get into the market, but that's about it.

Visio is already in the business, remember? Their Android tablet is pretty expensive, at $320 USD on Amazon right now.

The only unique and cost-cutting thing they could do would be to introduce PCs with ARM (or MIPS) CPUs, instead of x86. I doubt it, but if so, good luck to them. That still won't bring prices down significantly.