Netbook Pricing To Fall Fast

Those little compact mini-laptops known as Netbooks, may be heading for a fast price slide as more and more companies bring their models to market. It seems that companies were not entirely aware who was bringing the mini’s to market, until the Intel Developer’s Conference, which took place in San Francisco last week. It than become evident that dozens and dozens of companies were entering the mini marketplace.

The first to drop prices is Acer who dropped their Aspire pricing down to $349 from $399. It’s cutting the price of another netbook, the Linpus Linux Lite, to $329 from $379. But it gets better. According to this NY Times article it is estimated that by the holidays we could see $249 mini’s.

Heavy price competition is never a happy thing for manufacturers. More broadly, this netbook category has been a mixed blessing for the personal computer electronics industry.

The category threatens to upset some very established computing giants – from Microsoft to Hewlett-Packard – because they don’t require the powerful on-board software and computing power that have driven marketing and sales in the past.

Intel has said that it is fully embracing the category because it sees the opportunity to help drive and capitalize on a new market.

That is going to be the beauty part of the mini’s. They are set to be basic Internet machines. Couple them with the start of cloud computing and this could put a huge dent in some companies pocket book. Only the strong may survive this change. So it should be interesting to see what happens.

Wait until the dual-core Atom chips arrive from Intel and they start to show up in the mini’s.

What do you think. Will the new mini’s change the way we compute?

Comments welcome.

Source.