A headlong dive in price in the netbook market
I know that computers are supposed to go down in price on a regular basis but the drops recently seem even more extreme than usual unless, of course, it’s just me keeping more of an eye on them than normal.
For instance, the Acer Aspire One that I bought in early December is now replaced by a model that comes with twice the RAM and 50% more storage space for exactly the same money. Now, that’s pretty typical of computers but the impact on the lower end of the market is a little more extreme.
The somewhat less cute version that Maplin originally put out for £160 at one stage came with all of 128MB RAM, 2GB space and a 7″ screen was obviously severely overpriced when the 512MB RAM, 8GB storage and 9″ display Acer dropped to £135 so the Maplin price has pretty much collapsed to £99 and may have a little further to fall yet. Actually, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to think that perhaps it’s time to consider getting one to leave in the living room to read the paper on or whatever.
And, of course, these price drops and performance improvements can only continue. Next year we can expect that the Acer will be down to close to that £99 price point with potentially the Maplin or something similar coming in around £50.
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