The un-Netbook: Acer laptop hits $279 at Best Buy
Updated on August 23 at 6:45 a.m. PDT: adding updated $299 price of Toshiba laptop.
Netbooks based on Intel's Atom processor faced a fresh assault this week: the $279 AMD-based Acer laptop.
Here's the $299--or this case, the $279---question: do you want a Netbook or a Notebook?
The choice: a Netbook with a 10-inch screen, an Intel Atom processor, no optical drive, and Windows XP that weighs about two pounds? Or, a notebook with a 15.6-inch screen, a higher-performance AMD or Intel processor, an optical drive, and Windows Vista that weights about six pounds?
Best Buy was selling a 15-inch Acer laptop for $279.99 on Wednesday.
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)On Wednesday, Best Buy was offering an Acer laptop (AS5516-5474) that had been previously listed at $299.
A Best Buy salesperson in a Southern California store said these deals typically last a week.
Acer $279.99 laptop
(Credit: Best Buy )The specifications: an AMD Athlon TF-20 64 processor, 15.6-inch WXGA display, 2GB DDR2 memory, DVD-RW drive, 160GB hard disk drive, ATI Radeon Xpress 1200 graphics, 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition.
Pretty close to basic mainstream-laptop hardware with the exception of the low-end AMD-ATI silicon and the older "g" wireless.
It weighs in at 6 pounds and measures 1.5-inches thick.
Earlier this month, Best Buy was offering a $299 Toshiba laptop sporting a 15-inch screen but then bumped the price up to $329.
Update: As of August 23, the price of the Toshiba Satellite with an Intel Celeron Processor (Onyx Blue, model: L305-S5955) had been cut to $299. The laptop showed wide availability, as of August 23.
But whether it's a $279, $299, or $329, it's a laptop design that has legs. And a real competitor to the 10-inch Netbook, which costs about the same.
And here's another question: As more of these $279-$329 deals are seen at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and as more ultra-thin laptops appear that approach $600 in price, what will happen to the popularity of the Netbook?
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. 
You'd find half these specs, or double this price.
your right.. you couldn't find a Mac with these specs.. but Apple doesn't sell junk.
That said.. I'm seriously thinking about getting something like this just for the hell of it... even though my 2003 era 1 Ghz powerbook could run circles around it... it's hard to beat that price. It would be a great sandbox for 7 or a hackintosh.
Hackintosh
there's no point in paying the tax on the hardware when the software is what makes a Mac any good
I'm glad for you. I have a mid-2007 MacBook that is on its third hard disk and fourth keyboard. And I've BABIED this system! Currently, the battery casing is deforming, making me wonder whether it might blow. Thank GOD for buying APP, otherwise, I'd have had to shell out lots of bucks to fix this thing.
I love OS X, but the hardware is a dog. I got 6 (SIX) years out of my ThinkPad without a single failure. No comparison in reliability.
AMD is not in the netbook game, so they are probably willing to sacrifice margins, so they don't miss a sale entirely.
In any case, there are now a lot of attractive mobility options (smartphones, netbooks, notebooks, etc.), so consumers can decide which option(s) match their mobility, functionality & cost constraints.
Two words: no way!
There is a valid reason why smart phones are getting smaller, and why netbooks are increasing in popularity. People are finding that a full-on OS like Windows Vista is not necessary. Something as simple as a netbook running XP, or even an iPhone is enough for many people. As a matter of fact, the west is way behind the 8-ball when it comes to portable technology. In Japan, the entire country is swamped with smart phones. If you're constantly on the move like the Japanese, you don't want to be lugging a 15-inch laptop. Trust me - the trend is the APPLICATION, and not the HARDWARE. If applications end up becoming web-based, then the hardware will follow suit. That's the direction I anticipate. To think that cheap traditional laptops will take over demonstrates the lack of thinking out of the box that the days of the traditional full-on OS may soon end.
I agree with the others that observe laptops and netbooks do not serve the same market. I've carried around my little XO laptop all day at a conference and while on vacation, where you start to feel every ounce you are carrying. I'll take my XO over a six pound laptop any day for those use cases. At some point I'll trade up to one of the newer, more capable netbooks, but I've been pretty impressed with what I *can* do with my little 433 MHz XO laptop. Maybe it helps that my first PC was a 1 MHz Apple ][+, so I can better appreciate what computer running at less than 1 GHz can do with the right software.
I understand that the XO uses an AMD Geode, but I don't believe that the Geode is being utilized in any commercial "netbooks".
My comment was based on previous articles I read about AMD not planning to enter the netbook segment. An example of such an article is the following by CNET:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10097479-64.html
Perhaps things have changed, but that is not my understanding.
i use the netbook at school and when i travel to conventions. it's small enough to fit in the accessory pocket of my backpack, so i don't have to worry about accidentally putting my books on it. plus it's cheap enough that losing it/it getting stolen isn't life threatening. i use it to take notes in class and catch up on email, facebook, and the like while i am out and about. the 700 series can also boot from an SD card and has an atheros card as well for injection and replay hijinks with backtrack linux, should the need arise.
my full sized laptop has more usb ports, more ram, and a larger HDD, but it mostly moves around my house and only occasionally makes a trip to a coffee shop or on a war driving expedition. i use it primarily to write papers and code while sitting at the kitchen table or on my bed. i like the full sized keyboard and large screen for these tasks.
my desktop sits in a room with the wife's and kids' desktops plus a few consoles, so someone is almost always gaming near it. this is a lot of fun, especially when we are all gaming together, but not great for homework or project work. i hope someday to have a small office where i can work on my laptop, but for now it's my bedroom or the kitchen.
i am thinking of picking up another netbook (probably an msi wind since it can run mac os X with a little hacking) to use for school since it has a slightly larger keyboard (for more accurate note taking) and dedicating my 700 to hacking conventions and network troubleshooting and just leaving it in the bag with my networking tools.
you do have a point about price. 4 years ago, the thought of having 3 notebooks dedicated to specific tasks (school, hacking, work etc.) was outrageous given the street price for even a low end refurb laptop.
I have Firefox running for weeks at a time with over a dozen tabs open plus other applications running on my 5 year old Dell laptop with half the hardware of this guy (which also cost 10x as much). It shows its age compared to my new desktop, but it's quite functional so I'm sure this guy runs fantastically.
You clearly didn't read his post. He didn't say the specs were awful, he said Acer laptops are crap.
That implies the build quality, perhaps the quality of the parts, is severely lacking.
I can run Firefox with roughly a dozen tabs open, two IM applications, my firewall, my email client and have my music player running in the background. That doesn't negate his comment any more than yours does.
As far as build quality, that doesn't make Firefox bog down. Hard drive errors make your hard drive crash. Memory errors make you BSOD whenever you access the dead zone. Screen defects make your screen not work. It's not some analog scale that lets everything run fine but just slows down particular software...he just doesn't like Acer.
Again, you didn't read the guy's post. Acer was and IS known to put together laptops with the very minimal hadrware they can get away with, and also blast the hard drive with bloated software. I bought a laptop for my niece before realizing that Vista requires a MINIMUM of 2GB RAM. The laptop came with 1GB RAM. I had to purchase another 1GB of RAM to reach the maximum 2GB the laptop can handle. And even with that, after waiting about 5 minutes to complete a boot, 50-percent of the RAM was already in-use. Please don't make comments when you have absolutely no understanding of the person's situation. If you Google around, you'll find that Acer is notorious for putting out lousy products.
It's like buying generic drugs vs branded drug... the only big difference is the price.
We have acer and it runs just fine on Vista. The one headache we had with acer is that there are so many acer software installed in the machine and they hog system resources (sometimes even crashing it). After we removed them from startup, the system ran a lot smoother and faster. Maybe that's what 50gray's talking about?
Hey groink_hi, Vista minimum fro Home basic is 512MB, for the rest 1GB:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx
So it's Microsoft's fault... or may it's still Acer's fault for throwing a bunch of software running in the background that are not really needed and would have been used by the browser of MS Word, etc...
512MB for home for Vista sounds silly but it works for a few people I know. Acer machines are still selling quite a bit in Microcenter - a lot of people still fall in line for it when prices like this appear in their catalog (in Santa Clara/silicon valley).
I would spend $30 more and get a Toshiba, I have owned two and they never gave me any problems.
Different strokes for different folks, but wouldn't want to have either as a desktop replacement/main machine.
What about 10/100 ethernet? Haven't bought a PC in... well ever... but isn't a gigabit NIC pretty much standard on notebooks now?
I haven't seen 10baseT on anything in years.
I use Ubuntu for everything but I have friends who boot into Windows at work and Ubuntu at home and they are quite happy with that arrangement.
I would like to say that this is a good day for consumers but the ramifications will be dire. The PC is a dying platform for games, due in part to the popularity of notebook computers - the vast majority of them with sub-standard graphics hardware. Also forget about having 1" thin metallic cases or slot-loading DVD drives or magnetic break-away power connectors or 7 hour batteries, all found on Apple's latest MacBook Pro. The PC notebook is becoming a different (lesser) type of computer.
As I see it, there are two choices. Stick with the PC notebook platform and sink into the thick plastic sea of mediocrity. Or let go of the sinking "Titanic", grasp onto the floating Apple with both arms, and rise to the surface, once again feeling the sun on your face. Good thing there is an Apple store in my city.
i disagree.... you do not need to replace your PC to handle the newest game title - just keep upgrading the Video Card until the bottleneck is no longer the Video card but something else - the processor or whatever, then upgrade the MOBO, get new ram and you are back on track. If you stay about 6 months to a year behind the bleeding edge then upgrades are very affordable - and you're still enjoying some pretty great-looking graphics/performance, which typically rivals what you see on consoles anyway.
Overall PC game sales might be declinging but thats no indicator of PC's losing their viability as a gaming platform, if that was your point. Its more of a market thing with the current economy. But, for the PC Gaming industry as a whole Windows 7 will offer a fairly large leap forward with more 64-bit support from third party hardware mfrs, the next version of DirectX, etc....
The only other gaming platform are the consoles and they rev every few years, not multiple times a year - you can upgrade however/whenever you want with Desktop PC's.
With a laptop as a gaming machine you are spending easily the same amount of money if not more AND you don't have the upgradeability. Sure, some gaming laptops have upgradeable video cards but those machines are more expensive still, and eventualy you will hit the cieling in upgradeability much sooner than on a regular PC.
It's one thing to sell a comparable computer for less money, but to keep hocking more and more notebooks that are woefully less capable and appealing is bound to have a negative effect somewhere along the line. PC gaming is right in the crosshairs.
One more thing, Apple is a great company that knows all about the benefits of market-share, but they also know the befits to high margins. Market share is great, but profitability is always more important.
what a fanboy
Mac OS, Windows, and Linux are all useful
and that isn't changing any time soon
I hear people buying these for kids school work. I doubt you could install open office on that small of a drive. I think the low end Acer laptop is a better deal.
For 20gb with Linux, you can have OpenOffice, Gimp, pretty much all the apps you'd want. The only concern is room for MEDIA files (music & pictures)... your office docs do not take nearly as much space. But trust me, 20gb is very usable for a Netbook.
A "real" laptop is more powerful and easier to type on, but bulkier and heavier to haul around. Battery life is usually shorter, too.
If you want to understand what draws people to netbooks, try to find a "real" notebook that offers all the following features: 9-13" screen (any bigger and the form factor makes it less portable than a netbook), 4+ hour battery life, price $400 or less, weight under 3.5 pounds, and an Intel x86 compatible CPU (so it's capable of running Linux, Windows, or a hacked OS X if that's your thing). My netbook (brand new) meets all those criteria. Many new and used notebooks do not.
According to Apple's web site, its 13.3" MacBook weighs 5 pounds, which is 1-2 pounds more than a netbook. The used ones I've seen on eBay run $600 and up (final sale price) unless they're broken. The MacBook Air fits the criteria, but finding one for $400 or less won't be easy. (I'm not disparaging these machines, just explaining why they aren't a substitute for netbooks.)
Sony, Lenovo, and others offer machines in the general size/weight range, but their prices are also likely to exceed $400 used and $1000 new. (Again, these are all fine machines, but they can't compete in the same price segment as the netbook.)
As for the iPhone (in the form of the iPod Touch), I have one and I like it a lot, but it is no substitute for a netbook or notebook PC. If you think it is, try typing in Brooke's entire article above using the iPhone on-screen keyboard. All that shuffling between alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation variants of the iPhone keyboard can become maddening and time-consuming. If you do that kind of writing on a regular basis (and I do), you would find the iPhone on-screen keyboard and its small display unacceptable for a lot of what you do. Don't get me wrong, it's a great device (and I carry it virtually everywhere I go). It's just not the equal of a notebook or netbook for a writer.
The netbook (rightly) dominates in this market segment because it offers a hard-to-beat combination of features at a low price (in a brand new device). If that feature set overlaps with your needs, a netbook may be a good fit for you. If not, there are lots of other machines on the market (like the Asus Brooke is talking about here). Just because the netbook doesn't meet your personal needs doesn't make it a bad choice for someone else with a different set of needs.
- by pir8matt September 15, 2009 2:06 PM PDT
- I think the popularity of netbooks has more to do with their small size, not so much cost. People like having a smaller machine for trips, when most of what is done is just email or web browsing. The cheap price is fine if you're looking for a notebook, but you don't get the small size so its kind of an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think someone looking for a small footprint is going to buy this just because its about the same money.
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