The rise of the $299 Wal-Mart laptop
Updated at 4:30 p.m. PDT: adding Windows 7 and Celeron processor information.
There's a new $299 laptop in vogue at stores--and it's not a Netbook.
Toshiba 15-inch Satellite has bounced around in price from $299 to $329
(Credit: Best Buy)These laptops sport big screens, optical drives, plenty of memory, and reasonable graphics horsepower. In other words, this is nothing like a $299 Netbook.
And, in case you haven't noticed, they sell out quickly. The $298 Wal-Mart laptop was gone before most people could reach for their wallet and the Best Buy $299 Acer laptop vanished almost overnight once the price went viral.
Best Buy chimed in again very briefly for a few days (during the week of August 3) with a $299 Toshiba laptop sporting a 15-inch screen but then bumped the price up to $329.
But whether it's a $298, $299, $309, or $329, it's a laptop design that has landed. And it is a real competitor to the 10-inch Netbook, which costs about the same.
Here's the challenge: a lot of the Netbook's appeal is price. If retailers offer something with more robust hardware in the same price range, these tiny laptops are at risk of falling off back-to-school shopping lists.
And speaking of beefier hardware. The salient specifications of the Toshiba include a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.
It was reviewed by CNET when it was $350. With a few more dollars knocked off the price, it may warrant at least an additional half-star.
Updates:
As one reader warned, Best Buy does not show--at least not on the Best Buy Web page for this particular Toshiba model (L305-S5955)--that the laptop qualifies for a free Windows 7 upgrade. This upgrade is indicated, however, on the Best Buy Web pages of more expensive laptops running higher-end versions of Windows Vista.
There also appears to be some confusion about the difference between the Atom and Celeron 900 processors. The Celeron 900 is rated at 2.20GHz, integrates 1MB of cache memory, and has an 800MHz bus. By comparison, the widely-used Atom N270 is rated at 1.60GHz, integrates 512KB of cache memory, and has a 533MHz bus.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
The Celery 900 is slower than an Atom, the memory bandwidth is less, it generally performs worse, and uses more power.
So it's not a superior computer in that side of performance. The ATI 4500 is better than the GMA950 hands down, but most of that power will be used to drive the larger screen resolution and Vista's GUI overhead. I think the only place where the laptop may shine is playing back video content.
So it's more like:
Do I want a slower, heavier, short battery life computer with a larger screen and optical drive that may play videos a bit better, or do I want a faster, smaller, lighter machine, usually with 2-3x the battery life, but smaller screen and no optical drive.
Neither is a real desktop replacement. Both are too weak for that.
http://www.hwbot.org/hardware.compare.do?type=cpu&id=1924_1&id=1697_1
And a Netbook usually maxes out at 2GB ram, whereas this laptop can handle up to 4GB. Combined with the much larger screen and better resolution, the 2 both have their pros and cons, if you need small and light or very long battery life you go with the netbook, otherwise the laptop is a much better computing experience for those that just want something to use plugged in around the house.
Another generation of processor speed increase / price decrease will have these laptops sporting some real horsepower, they'll probably have another gig of ram, and right as SSD get cheap where it matters: 64-128 gigs and up, the point where it's all the storage most people will need for their laptop.
Obviously netbooks will improve too, but when you can get a laptop for that price that wins in almost every category, I'm thinking netbooks will either be over, or we'll have some incredible form factors. These laptops will also still be shrinking, so are we going to see netbooks as thin as CD cases?
You have to do the right comparison.
An Atom 1.6 N270 is faster than a Celery 900 2.2. It gets higher Benchmarks than even a Celery 2.4. It has higher memory throughput, too. But that's the N270, which is FASTER than the wrong comparison you are showing. Almost all netbooks are N270 (or N280 like my Toshiba), though there are still a few sluggish Z series out there like the Dell 10.
I "got the idea" from research.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2008/msi/msi-wind-notebook/g4.htm
As for the 4GB memory... That laptop may be able to hold 4GB and have Windows tell you 4GB is installed, but it can't address 4GB of usable RAM. It can only actually address under 3GB after MMIO and video RAM are allocated to addresses.
The Celeron in the said laptop is prolly a Penryn chip
the benchmarks you were looking at had a Netburst variety of Celery
the only non Netburst Celeron clocked at 2.4GHz is a dual core chip based on Allendale
As others have already noted, you are making the wrong comparisons. One comparison is for a 900MHZ celeron, not a 900 model @ 2.2Ghz, and the other comparison is the much older 2.4Ghz Celeron.
Anyone who owns a netbook will tell you it is markedly slower than even a Pentium III in many applications.
Just to settle this debate once and for all, INTEL has publicly stated that the NEXT GENERATION of Atom processor will have "about the same performance as a notebook PC circa 2004". The Atom is all about low power consumption for UMPCs and netbooks, it has never been about coming anywhere close to the speed of a full sized processor.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/computers/?p=800
The atom is fine for simple web browsing, e-mail etc, but from personal experience I can say that my Thinkpad x40 with a 1.2Ghz Pentium M runs as fast or faster than my wife's Toshiba Mini NB205 with the Atom N280. It runs just fine for her needs, but I certainly wouldn't call it a speed demon.
1. The Mobile Intel Celeron 353 (900 MHz, FSB 400)
2. The Mobile Intel Celeron 2.2GHz (2200 MHz, FSB 400)
3. The Mobile Intel Celeron 900 (2200 MHz, FSB 800)
The first two benches slower than an N270. The last one is the one used by the Toshiba. It's a brand new Celeron (2009) based on 45nm Penryn, and it's way faster than any Atom.
For $299 this laptop probably has really decent performance, a step above any netbook for sure, especially with the GMA 4500MHD.
It is what it is. If it doesn't meet your needs, then don't get it. Just remember that plenty of other people have purchased it and found it to be just what they need.
That means merely stepping to the $399 price point should get you huge bang for your buck.
you can buy an IC i7 for $280 free shipping but keep it int the box. unless you are willing to shell out a few more $$$ to make it work.
They take a Core 2 Duo, strip it down a bit (lower L2 cache, no VT), and sell it as Pentium.
They take that Pentium, strip it down even more (single core, no 64-bit), and sell it as Celeron.
But ALL of these chips basically have the SAME core inside. In this case they're all Penryn-3M.
As always, YMMV, but 2 gigs is what you need to run VIsta properly, anything less is when you'll have issues.
So yeah I'd say for most people, 2GB is fine for Vista.
It's just not what people want.
Looks like MS is dumping old licenses
boy!
"Windows Vista Home Basic Edition" -- that's what's in the retail channel now and that's what they are using. Windows 7 isn't available. What else are they supposed to offer?
Spin it any way you want. You still come off as a clueless hater.
I doubt your average CNET poster is in their target audience. And despite being mocked for it, I'll say it again, there are poor people out there for whom three hundred bucks is a lot of money. If the alternative is not having a laptop cause it costs $500, then this is good for those people.
you already got my point!
I'm a couple years out of college and not struggling to get by by any means, but that's still an amount of money I notice and don't just casually toss around.
If your life isn't heavily centered around a computer, then the difference between 6-800 bucks and suddenly having a decent $300 option is probably enough to move you from the "it's only a couple years old and working fine, I'll replace it in another year or so" to going ahead and grabbing one.
So don't be ashamed of grabbing one of these machines, it will serve you fine.
But on a Toshiba Netbook with 7-8 hours of battery, you could rip your DVDs to disk/thumbdrive and watch 4 of them...
If you claim the advantage of the netbook is the ability to play ripped movies from DVD on the netbook to save power as you don't have to spin the DVD drive.... then why not just do the same on the laptop as well? Ripped movie files play on netbooks as well as laptops.
Plus the laptop has the DVD drive there already to rip the movies in the first place- the netbook doesn't.
I think you're trying to make the assumption that these cheap laptops are meant to compete with netbooks- they aren't. They aren't even in the same class or have the same customer base.
@ik just because it is notebook does not mean you can't use it while being stationary plugged in on the AC power.
Also copying a dvd to the hard drive (or an usb stick for more power saving) takes several minutes, after that you don't need the media. Not to mention that on those notebooks with integrated ATI/Nvidia (one day mb intel too) that support hardware accelerated playback you can save more power by decreasing the cpu speed while watching movies (on my Asus I can watch DivXes with CPU @ 700 mhz and 30% utilization)...
Great Idea! Ty.
For my needs, it is ideal. But there are needs for a laptop too at times so I can see having both. I'd leave the laptop home and take the netbook traveling.
Well, 'great' for a netbook at least.
Cody
I have to just laugh when friends come up to me and tell me their screen died and how their laptop is a POS after the third repair.....ummm duh. You spend less then a grand on the thing.
The simple fact is these devices that cost less then a grand are that cheap for a reason. OEMs cut costs somewhere. And when your inverter board dies on your LCD. When you system board dies because the system is overheating because they didn't put much in a way of a cooling system in the device. When the ball bearings start going bad and your system makes noises...don't start complaining that the company is crap. You get what you pay for.
Oh and before someone says. Well guess what. My system I spent 3 grand on had a bad system board so that doesn't prove anything. Wrong. All computers have problems. ALL. The thing is the odds of having issues does go up the cheaper the device is. Again I've seen this first hand.
So go ahead and buy your cheap laptop. It will have problems eventually. Or you may simply be one of the lucky few who skates by with no problems over 3 years....but you will be the lucky few.
But basic 3rd grade English aside, why do you arbitrarily declare that a netbook can be "integrated and cheap" (I assume you mean inexpensive) while a laptop must be "cheaply made"? I'm guessing you bought one of the early netbooks with a high price tag and low hardware specs, and now you can get laptops with better hardware for cheaper.
Yes, you take a risk when you buy cheap Chinese hand-built junk, but a reputable seller still has quality controls, and your warranty covers being the unlucky 1 in 10,000. The fact is that electronics have become commoditized, so you can't really point to an off-the-shelf processor, memory chip, or disk drive and claim it's a POS with anything better than anecdotes from your friend at ITT Tech who's hacked together at LEAST five computers and knows for a fact Acers (or Dells, or whatever) are total crap.
Six Sigma says otherwise.
Yes, you get what you pay for, but if you care for what you get, you can make that cheap laptop do what you need it to do. If you tend to abuse systems, then you need something that is more resistant to that sort of treatment.
The actual components such as memory, hard drives, optical drives, etc- those really don't vary much between any of the OEM's of brand levels. The same parts in that $250 netbook can often be found in the $2000 MacbookPro. It's a matter of how it's put together and designed.
netbook FAIL
But most pc's sold today are crippled because computer manufactures need to find additional avenues to make a profit. So they stuff as much trial software as they can to make a few dollars. I believe our government should be looking into these unfair consumer practices. Consumers should not buy a computer get home and find out their computer is slow or crippled.
I think companies should be forced to display a warning message that says you computer has software that could cause your computer to run slow or be unusable.
What's "unfair" about the computer you agreed to pay for? You could've built your own instead, but you obviously preferred the one you bought.
If you'd prefer not to have some of the software on there, you can spend an extra ten minutes during your initial setup to remove what you don't want. That's what I did with the HP I got a killer deal on, and it runs like an absolute champ. You'd rather give the Barney Franks and Nancy Pelosis of the world yet another program, budget, and layer of control over your life?
People have such a warped view of the world and what they should be "entitled" to these days...
However the situation isn't as simple as ofmynoy thinks and the fault lies not with Dell but rather with Microsoft and Gates' brilliant understanding of how to succeed by forcing your stuff on consumers. The government, but really judges, did look into this problem and the crap problem that bothers ofmynoy is their solution. Part of the solution to Microsoft's strangle hold is to legally require Dell to allow other software companies to ship their stuff on the PC. That's the world we live in, thanks to Gates.
Two possible solutions: I have ordered computers from Dell and requested that they be imaged with a non-crapified factory image and they have done that and I have gotten a clean PC. The other solution is a program I saw here on CNET or zdnet called "DeCrapifier," I haven't tried it.
As good as that statement sounds, it is self contradictory. To say that you didn't get your money's worth means that you could have paid less or the same and gotten something of better quality, in which case you are would not "pay for quality," but still get quality.
I also don't buy into the statement: "You get what you pay for." Because often you pay for more than what you get.
I think a better statement is: "At best, you get what you pay for," but that's really not good either because often you can get bargains or steals and get more than you would expect.
"You get what you pay for" is a catchphrase that means: "The more you pay, the more you get." That may be true sometimes but in general a "bang for buck" analysis is best, if possibly counterproductive overkill for many purchases.
Regarding the notation about this model not offering the Windows 7 upgrade on the Best Buy website- Windows Vista Home BASIC is not eligible for the free upgrade program! Vista Home Premium or above is required to get the free Win 7 upgrade!
- by t8 August 15, 2009 8:31 PM PDT
- Theoretically speaking if a laptop can come down to such prices, then a Netbook should be able to fall well below that price, rendering your argument pointless.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
-
- by nathan309 August 16, 2009 10:59 AM PDT
- ownage!
- Like this
-
Showing 1 of 3 pages (103 Comments)