Business | Technology
Unfamiliar brand name tops popularity contest in laptops
No-frills notebooks are finally approaching the $100 mark.
- By Chris Nuttall, Financial Times
- Published: 01:39 February 2, 2008
An unfamiliar brand name sits atop the Amazon.com bestseller list for notebook computers.
This hourly-updated popularity contest has recently been dominated by Taiwan's Asus rather than Silicon Valley's Apple.
Five of the top 10 at one point last week were Asus machines, compared with three Apples, one Toshiba and one Hewlett-Packard unit.
Unlike the sleek, powerful $1,000-plus MacBooks, the Asus notebooks were $300-$400 variations on a basic laptop model called the Eee. It has a feeble processor, a small seven-inch screen and a tiny two to four gigabytes of storage. Yet the Eee is being seen as more indicative of the future of computers than the MacBook Air, the wafer-thin laptop unveiled to gasps by Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, at the Macworld trade fair last month.
"Asus is showing that a new model is developing, the Eee is a very nice device and it's sold 300,000 units in its first two months," says Stephen Dukker, who as chief executive of eMachines in the 1990s helped drive down the price of desktop PCs from an average of about $700 to $400. EMachines sold two million of its bare-bones machines in its first year but this entry-level price has barely been lowered by others in the intervening years.
Terminal pricing
"Desktop PCs reached terminal pricing about 10 years ago; with the $300 notebook, we're now reaching terminal pricing there," he says.
If so, it comes at a critical juncture. Such is the growth of laptop sales in recent years that Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, is predicting a crossover point for next year, when notebook sales will overtake those of desktop PCs. It expects the mass adoption of portable PCs in emerging markets and is introducing lower-power chips for smaller, cheaper machines. It is also producing its own $300 "Classmate PC", in concert with local manufacturers in the developing world, to be used in schools
Meanwhile, One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit organisation founded by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed the XO, a bright green laptop with protruding antenna ears that currently costs $188 to produce. The aim has been to reduce its cost to just $100, far below the $300 level that Dukker and Asus see as currently feasible.
OLPC lost its chief technology officer when Mary Lou Jepsen left to start her own low-cost laptop company. Pixel Xi is aiming for a $75 or even a $50 laptop in the next two to three years. "Computers have been an exception. If you look at consumer electronics, a DVD player was about $800 10 years ago - now they sell for $20," she says.
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