You may have recently heard that Asus Eee PC was planning on raising prices up to 20% on some Eee PC models, sometime in March. Turns out that it’s not the case, although the average price will probably go up (more on that at the bottom).
From what it sounds like, some things were lost in translation at some point. During a conference call this morning, Doug Aamoth at CrunchGear asked ASUS CEO Jerry Shen about the price increases (if there would be any), and this was the response:
“Actually, the price is based on market competition so until now, for the netbook, the product shift from nine-inch to ten-inch models will help in Q1. So most of the product will be ten-inch based and so the price will be a little bit higher than the nine inch. But that’s based on the [move from nine to ten inches], not on the original price.
And for the notebooks, actually, there’s a lot of inventory from our competitors, so there’s no way to raise the price much.â€
It boils down to the 10″ Eee PCs will be priced slightly higher than 8.9″ Eee PCs. Going forward, Asustek (along with most others) will be moving towards 10″ netbooks/ultraportables being the dominant display size. Once the large majority of their line is in the 10″ range, it would not be surprising to see the average price be higher than it is now, where you still have a large number of 8.9″ and even some of the older 7″ models still around.
Obviously Asustek is interested in keeping prices down – they have kept the cost of the Asus Eee PC 1000HE down to under $400 while adding some new features (such as a new keyboard). It’s definitely helped by being released around the same time as the 10-inch Acer Aspire One which has an even lower price, coming in at around $350 USD.
Read: CrunchGear