Commentary

Wired Magazine on Netbooks

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Wired Magazine has written a comprehensive and fairly balanced article on netbooks. Whether it ends up in the November edition of the print magazine (I didn’t see it in October’s), I don’t know. I do know it was pretty well written and researched and it … Read more

The Success of Netbooks vs UMPCs and Tablet PCs

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There’s no doubt that netbooks have been wildly successful. Ultraportable laptops in the 11″ and below range have always done fairly well in Asia, even before the netbooks came along, but the netbooks have been more successful in other parts of the world than many … Read more

Netbooks Are Impacting Notebook Sales

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Netbook It turns out that netbooks maybe having an impact on notebook sales, going by what some analysts are saying. Back in August, we mentioned comments by Intel’s Chief Financial Officer about the concern of netbooks cannibalizing larger / mainstream notebooks. They felt it was growing the market and should be looked at in that light (and from that angle, they are correct, netbooks are the first exposure many have to laptops).

On Tech Trader Daily, there is an article that mentions analysts a slowdown in the notebook market due to netbook sales – that perhaps netbooks are eating away at the entry-level notebooks. Obviously Intel is not too affected – a sale of an Intel CPU is still a sale of an Intel CPU, even at a lower profit margin, but it still impacts their financials to an extent. Apple on the other hand (and they are mentioned), they are the only major producer that hasn’t publicly announced or hinted heavily at jumping into the netbook market (I would argue however that they are the most anticipated, judging by the number of people shoehorning OS X onto netbooks.

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Netbooks, Pricing, and the Used Market

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Asus Eee PC 904 I’ve written about this in the past – the pricing of some netbooks / sub-notebooks and how some of them seemed a bit high. Now we are reaching a point where there is some real competition (from Acer and Lenovo). Last month, we saw a $100 rebate on certain 8.9″ Intel Mobile Celeron-powered Asus Eee PC 900 models. It went on for the full month at several online retailers in the US and it dropped the price below $450 in some cases.

The same $100 rebate (or rather a new one) is currently available on some models at Amazon.com through the end of the month. It’s also showing up for various models of the Asus Eee PC 900 at MWave.com as well as at Buy.com, and OnSale.com. A quick check of Amazon UK as well as a few other distributors in Europe doesn’t show the rebates (or price drops), but I’m sure we’ll see something in regards to pricing at some point.

With September coming up in less than a few weeks, and with the Acer Aspire One available now (at $379 and $399), and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 shipping in September for around $430 (and presumably the Dell Inspiron 910), it really makes me wonder when Asus is going to permanently drop the price on these things (as well as drop the prices on their Atom-based lines, along with MSI on the Wind netbooks).

I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the Intel Mobile Celeron in these things versus the Intel Atoms in the Asus Eee 901 (and the above mentioned Acer and Lenovo models). The average consumer that this market is oriented towards is not going to know the difference or care. I take that back. They’ll hear “1.6GHz Atom versus 900MHz Celeron” or “120GB HDD versus 20GB SSD” and they’ll respond accordingly.

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iPhones and Netbooks

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James Kendrick has a great article about the rise of the netbooks and how they are changing the laptop landscape these days, and why peoples’ views (mainstream users) are changing. He points to the iPhone as changing how people are viewing netbooks. They are basically looking for cheap devices where they can, as JK points out, “jump on the Internet”, do email and get their photos off their camera”. The iPhone was the major turning point – it showed people that they didn’t need a huge setup to access the internet, check email, etc. With the Acer Aspire One hitting $400 (and with Dell and Lenovo possibly hitting that area) with a decent sized screen and keyboard, all of the sudden many people who wouldn’t normally consider a second computer in the house, or a laptop (or even a second laptop) are seeing how easy it is to hop on the internet, check email, etc., and they want that and it’s now in their price range.

He thinks, and I agree, that the major turning point will be when they are available in the big-box retailers. We are already seeing this with some – Circuit City is a good example with the Acer Aspire One (albeit many Circuit Citys have them on hand, but they aren’t always displayed because they don’t have a good way of securing them, according to one CC employee I talked to over the weekend). Best Buy seems wishy-washy at times but will probably start offering a lot more Asus Eee PCs as we get closer to the holidays at the end of the year. Wal-Mart will probably accelerate things as well. By the end of this year, they will probably have three (if not more) different offerings from three different brands.

I have two major concerns though:

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