14 DAY TRIAL // With all the craze surrounding tablets, netbooks have long since stopped being the wonder child of the IT market, with such machines having now been forced to get price cut after price cut or suffer severe sales declines.
If one were to tell Acer, ASUS and all other netbook makers, early last year, that their low-end machines would be having trouble about now, the implication would have probably warranted scoffs.
Basically, before tablets, the iPad that is, came out, it was widely believed that low-end laptop sales would keep rising over the next few years.
Then, of course, tablets debuted and, after Android and ARM started to show off their worth, began to affect netbook sales increasingly much.
As such, IT players had to cut down on the prices of these entry-level mobile personal computers, even though tablets are already more expensive than they are, for the most part anyway.
The most recent episode of cost reduction occurred just a short while ago, if a report is to be believed that is, to below even NT$10,000, which is the equivalent of US$345.
Acer has the dual-OS AOhappy-N55D, which has both Windows 7 and Android. It is now selling for less than NT$10,000, while models based on the Atom N450 (the regular one has the N550) sell for NT$8,500.
ASUS's machines did not escape this phenomenon either. The Eee PC 1001PXD, for instance, is now sold at NT$7,999, even though its launch price was of NT$14,000.
For the record, this is a machine based on the older-generation Intel Atom N455 single-core central processing unit.
Meanwhile, the N450-based Eee PC 1001PX now sells for NT$8,500, while the 1015PEM (N550 dual-core) is priced at NT$9,999 (it sold for NT$15,000 initially).
All in all, about 90% of all netbooks selling through retail channels have seen their original prices cut down, repeatedly, just so the decline in monthly sales didn't suffer as much as it would otherwise, what with slates swooping in.