Small Cheap Computers Can Still Drop in Price a Bit at Robert Pogson

“Whether the potential low cost tablets will indeed become a major hit remains to be seen, as much of their quality and specs will likely be affected by the costs of the materials used. Nonetheless, should PC branded manufacturers release tablets that cost less than $150 USD, this will certainly put a lot pressure on China’s white-box tablets makers, and in turn intensify the pricing competition within the 2013 tablet market.”
see TrendForce：Component Replacements to Potentially Give Rise to Lower-than-$150 USD Tablet PCs|TrendForce – Press Center – English Version.

This is what healthy competition looks like, folks. The small guys are selling enough smartphones and tablets that the big guys are being squeezed. As usual, the consumer will benefit by being able to buy pretty good IT at very reasonable prices. It’s a good thing M$ gets no share of these gadgets. The price would have to rise ~25% to support M$ in the manner to which it has become accustomed. There’s no way OEMs can afford the burden of M$ these days.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

7 Responses to “Small Cheap Computers Can Still Drop in Price a Bit”

Feed for this Entry

1 Mats Hagglund Dec 16th, 2012 at 11:28 pm

Maybe Dell is making more money selling less Windows-computers than selling more computers with Linux? There are certain players of IT making money with crap M$ ecosystem (e.g those producing “data security”).

Surely our ecosystem would be better without Microsoft. However M$ is really making business and jobs by producing crap software.
2 dougman Dec 17th, 2012 at 1:24 am

The low-end price for tablets and smartphones will be $50. Automated manufacturing will allow the ability to speed up production and further saturate the market.

Think back when cell-phones first became available, same with PC’s. They were thousands of dollars, and now you get either one, or something comparable for for a few hundred dollars. Bear in mind however, when you add in inflation the cost is much lower in value.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?pagewanted=all
3 Mats Hagglund Dec 17th, 2012 at 9:10 am

So far iPad had dominated Finnish tablet market but now the turn point has come. This will be the first month when Android might get almost 50% market share in Finland.

Are we going to see Android as leading tablet OS in 2013? Likely yes.
4 oiaohm Dec 17th, 2012 at 9:30 pm

Mats Hagglund without closed source OS Dell has to compete head to head with their suppliers when it comes to android class devices.
5 eug Dec 20th, 2012 at 6:57 am

7 Top Linux Trends of 2012

https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/682976-7-top-linux-trends-of-2012-/
6 eug Dec 20th, 2012 at 8:10 am

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Chumby-developer-building-open-source-laptop-1771223.html
7 Robert Pogson Dec 20th, 2012 at 8:13 am

I like that “LInux preloaded” trend. I wish we had some statistics on that, because it’s definitely a growth industry globally. Canonical+Dell is probably the world’s largest supplier of GNU/Linux PCs today to consumers.