Dirt Cheap Laptops
So it seems that laptop prices have fallen dramatically at the low end of the market, though the industry doesn’t seem to have reported this, it’s certainly a fact that a quick search for new laptop prices will quickly confirm. There are two major factors at play other than the global economic situation. The first is an attempt to compete with with netbooks. As many have pointed out already, you’re average Joe isn’t going to spend $3000 on a laptop when they can get a netbook for $500. People don’t know too much about features and specs, they are just numbers, much like the price.
Laptop purchasers know about convenience and certainly they know about budget, especially in these tight economic times. Laptops are more expensive for two reasons, they are smaller/more portable, and their components cost marginally more to manufacture (compared with a desktop of the same specs). Joe Consumer doesn’t understand/care about the second factor enough to convince them to pay 6 times the price. Ironically, once the prices became comparable, the main reason my folks wanted to go for the laptop over the netbook option I gave them was due to the larger size of the unit.
Since purchasing the cheapest new laptop I could find for AU$600, I’ve seen machines with better specs going for about the same price. I’ve also seen that exact laptop drop about $100 in 2 weeks (certainly due low demand). But why such low demand for low end laptops? Well the reason is that Vista sucks so bad it’s not funny. You can’t produce a really cheap laptop these days, because it must be able to run Vista! Customer dissatisfaction and return rates must be going through the roof for these guys.
Microsoft paniced when they realised that they had missed the netbook market completely, so they smashed out a netbook version of XP despite previous efforts to stick to their dead-horse-flogging “Vista is our one and only OS product now” guns. So in the process they have doomed the laptop market for all those hardware vendors trying to sell low end laptops and locked into volume licence agreements with Microsoft. I expect it’s having a ripple effect to the high end of the laptop market and even into the desktop market as well.
So yeah, I’m putting it out there. I’m going to state matter of factly that Microsoft has done a champion effort of destroying the laptop market by only allowing netbooks to bundle with XP.
On a side note, when I got the laptop for my mum I tried to install XP on there as a fall back plan. It took hours of installing updates and experimenting with different drivers. Eventually I reached the conclusion that the correct hard disk controller drivers did not exist, the hardware manufacturers did not support the laptop. So after spending hours and consuming about 500MB of my download quota I gave up and went back to Ubuntu. Ubuntu sure did use up a comparible amout of download quota performing the initial updates, but every device (and I mean everything) worked as intended. No user interation required other than clicking ‘ok’ buttons in the GUI. I was especially impressed that the USB wireless broadband modem was detected instantly and connected to the internet. I was sure that was going to be a problem but Ubuntu pleasently surprised me with the hardware support this time. Those guys at Canonical have really got themselves a pollished product. Shame that Gnome vs. KDE competeing for who sucks worse, but that’s another topic.