Intel Celeron chip anchors $249 Acer Windows 7 laptop
Best Buy is set to launch its lowest-advertised-price laptop to date--an Acer model based on Intel's venerable Celeron chip.
Acer laptop
(Credit: Best Buy)Thought Netbooks were as low as a laptop's price can go? Another category of ultra-low-cost laptops has quietly emerged. These aren't small or ultra-thin or frugal with power consumption. There's nothing remarkable about these laptops--except price.
Best Buy said it will start selling on Wednesday the $249 Acer laptop--the retailer's lowest-advertised-price laptop ever. The laptop comes with an Intel Celeron processor, 15.4-inch screen, 2GB memory, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Premium. The model is available while supplies last.
Currently, the lowest-priced laptop listed on Best Buy's Web site is an Acer Aspire with an Advanced Micro Devices Athlon Processor (model: AS5532-553). On Tuesday, it was selling for $329.
Why the proliferation of low-cost laptops? "It's gone from one PC per household to one PC per person," said Justin Barber, a Best Buy spokesman. "And sometimes more than one laptop per person," he said, referring to Netbooks, which are marketed as companion devices to a higher-end PC.
At the core of the low-cost Acer laptop is an Intel Celeron Processor 900--not an Intel Atom chip, which is standard fare for sub-$300 Netbooks. The Celeron is a faster design than Atom: the 900 series packs 1MB cache of cache memory and is rated at 2.20GHz.
By comparison, the Z550 Atom is rated at 2.0GHz and integrates only 512K of cache. The Atom's performance is also hampered by fundamental design constraints: it is built for power efficiency not speed.
Netbooks continue to be the most popular low-cost laptop category, however. Best Buy lists dozens of Netbooks on its Web site from Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Samsung, Gateway, Nokia, Lenovo, and Toshiba, among others. Most are priced around $350.
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. 
I suppose it's all about what you want to do with it and how much you want to pay.
Small laptop, Asus or Apple:
Are you going to run games on it? No.
Photoshop? No.
Huge databases? No.
Video editing? No.
Browse the web? Yes.
Check email? Yes.
Play online games? Yes.
Check your bank balance after spending/saving all that money? Yes.
Now see, for what you plan to use it for, it seems to me that $249 is a heck of a lot less than $999. Perhaps my math is off a bit, but $249 appears to be a much lower number than $999.
And I can cut video on this machine. I use photoshop. I run 10 programs at once sometimes. I run Windows in VMWare Fusion.
I have used this Celery processor you think is so equal. That machine CAN'T do what the low-end MacBook can do. No freaking way.
So just stop spreading LIES. You are a LIAR, you LIE all the time about apple products, and it's sad, really.
LIAR, LIAR, LIAR, LIAR. :-)
The Celeron 900 is basically an Intel Core 2 CPU with just one core enabled. It's a full 64-bit CPU unlike older Intel Macs which used the 32-bit Intel Core (not Core 2). This Celeron also runs at 800 FSB compared to 533 MHz for the older Macs.
Because the Celeron 900 has only one core enabled, it will obviously be at a disadvantage in multitasking and will look terrible in benchmarks. But for the vast majority of users who use a single active app at one time (web browsing, word processing, etc), the 900 yields pretty good "real world" performance similar to even new Macs.
I was going to sat the same thing, to be honest why not just get the Acer Timeline 4810 or 5810 series? They run a Core2 Solo SU3500, so what the clock speed is 1.4Ghz and 3MB cache 800MHX FSB, it comes with 4GB DDR3 and a nice 14" screen. It's light and has an nice battery life. Screw Net-craps.
As for video, depends on what quality video you're talking about. Again, my netbook can play resonable quality AVI files fine (I've never tried it with anything too hardcore), but since this is more powerful, I'm sure it could play at least dvd quality video fine (probably higher as well)
all for just $249
Intel is pushing its last bulk of Celerons with greater discounts
MS is pushing as much as it can to get the Win7 on comsumers cmputers by giving greater discounts.
Acer has already moved on to many other models, it also needs to get rid of some of the stock...
These all might be the reason behind this LOWES ever advertised laptop...
This is Wintel's response to the netbook threat so maybe you should help consumers just a bit by doing more than posting an ad for a $249 laptop? It's a great price for a low end laptop as long as a power outlet is always near by. But as for a portable netbook replacement goes, it is probably going to fail because of the short battery runtime.
Power consumption is the big benefit netbooks have over laptops with their ability to run for 7, 8, and more hours on battery is what makes them a great mobile device choice. That and their usually small size and price. Wintel now has met the price point but they can not meet the size and power usage bullet points and still run Windows.
Very tempting for the coffee table if the hardware is well supported via Linux.
The only reason he mentioned netbooks was price and power are somewhat similar. Obviously the netbooks have a huge advantage in battery and mobility - where as this is obviously more of a computer that you move from one location to another and plug in. I think this is a better deal for someone considering a netbook for price only. If someone needs it for mobility (that's why I got mine, and because of the price, I could afford it as a secondary computer), this isn't something to look at.
I brought up the Netbook issue because a Netbook is more than just a price and that is all this has in common with a Netbook. Anyways, the deal is that Microsoft and Intel MUST destroy the Netbook segment because they can not play in that space and make any money. Intel has to use top of the line processing technology to sell dirt cheap CPUs for the low priced, low power Netbooks. Microsoft can't get much of a licensing fee at all from a those low priced Netbooks and on top of that, their Windows 7 OS requires more hardware than XP required. Not much but more and it's been shown you have to have anti-virus running too so there goes performance out the window using Windows.
Netbooks are more than low price and it is a competitive battleground both those companies would rather see eliminated. So that is why I brought it all up. The author is doing their bidding by just associated the cheap price with Netbooks. They are not desktop replacements and running Windows, they're not even close.
BTW, Atoms were designed to go up against the AMD Geode and VIA processors on these low power hungry devices. MIDs was Intel's invention but it was probably the OLPC XO which started it all. The ARM chips used in the top of the line smartphones are putting tons of pressure on Intel in the Netbook space so there is yet another reason for them to want that segment gone. And Atoms are being built on the top of the line 45nm process lines with Intels high end/high priced CPUs but they have to sell them cheap. They must use the 45nm process lines to keep power usage low and even then they are only in the ballpark. The ARM Cortex a8 and multi-core a9's are a major threat.
yes I know alittle bit about this stuff.
:)
Some people are never happy...
Retail has its own advantage but this should kill xp based netbooks..
- by JabberWockey November 11, 2009 11:39 AM PST
- Lol! Celeron. *shakes head*
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