Follow us on TwitterAcer recently slashed the prices on their Aspire One netbooks by $50, which is huge. As a result, the entire netbook (and ultimately, the notebook) market will be impacted.
I was wondering when Moore’s Law would finally be applied to netbooks. Asus seemed to defy Moore’s Law by incrementally increasing the price with every new model they introduced.
Suddenly, paying $300 for an Eee PC 2G Surf does not make sense any more. Why would you when you can get the Aspire One for $329? The Aspire One has a bigger screen (8.9″ vs. 7″), bigger keyboard, the new Intel Atom processor, a larger drive (8 GB vs. 2 GB) and a case that is way more professional.
In fact, it no longer makes sense to pay almost $600 for an Eee PC 901. In fact, I prefer the Aspire One over the Eee PC 901, primarily due to its larger keyboard.
The MSI Wind 100 has a similar feature set with a larger screen. But it’s now priced about $200 more.
What this means is that everyone else will now need to respond.
Of course, this may or may not impact Dell. I was expecting that Dell would be the one who would drop this bomb on the rest of the players. I’m sure their new netbook will be priced appropriately.
Lenovo has already been complaining to the media about the low margins in netbooks. It will be ineteresting to see whether these lower price points have an impact on their planned introduction of the IdeaPad S9 and S10 which was forecasted for October.
HP’s Mini-Note was already rather high-priced, especially given the woefully slow VIA processor. They’ve been rumored to have something new in development. I believe we will see that shortly.
Now that Acer has taken the initiative, the reverberations are just beginning. We now get to see how things will shake out.
