Hey Asus, where's the $199 Eee PC?
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 22nd 2007 1:35AM
posted October 22nd 2007 1:35AM
Last week Asus finally revealed pricing and specs for their much anticipated Eee PC ultra-portable laptop. Anticipated not so much for the specs -- 7-inch LED-backlit LCD, 2 to 8GB of flash storage, up to 1GB memory, WiFi, and webcam -- but for the low, low $199 retail price. Rightly, more than a few of us were dismayed when the entry-level model was revealed to actually cost as much as US$358 in Taiwan and an expected $300 (pre-tax) price when launching Stateside before the month is out. The culprit? Well, according to DigiTimes' Taiwanese component insiders the relatively steep price is in large part due to an unexpectedly high cost for the 7-inch LCD panels. Asus had expected to source the panels for about $15 each but found themselves paying AU Optronics (AUO) and Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) up to twice as much for the hardware. Feel better for knowing? Yeah, didn't think so.
Ouch..
Err...so they paid $30 for the panel instead of $15...and that's why the computer is $100 more?
So...they felt compelled to mark up the $15 increase in cost 6x over for us? Thanks asus!
Asus -- more like Ass-us!
"Asus had expected to source the panels for about $15 each but found themselves paying AUO and CMO up to twice as much for the hardware"
and that adds $100 to the price tag how?
I still want one.
oh yes, with Foleo out of the picture, don't we all?
It's starting to range on rip off though. 350$ is enough for a pretty decent used laptop. Much more powerful than one of these at any rate which is barely powerful enough to run xp at even low speeds. Plus there's the no hard drive bit.
The only thing it has going for it at this point is size, which a lot of people do not find to be a terrific feature.
"The only thing it has going for it at this point is size, which a lot of people do not find to be a terrific feature"
I do, it's pretty annoying carrying my full sized laptop to college when I only really need for class on one day
and what's so bad about fast and reliable Linux?
> which is barely powerful enough to run xp at even low speeds
BS. I know people that run XP very satisfactorily on 750MHz Durons. It's more about the RAM and a reasonably fast HD than about absolute MHz. This notebook should do just fine for its intended use.
Umm The extra cost added to us isn't right, but its the way business does thing, then again for that price couldn't they go with Samsung or LG-Philips?
Dear Asus,
I dont give a Flying F#@& about the cost doubling, stop stalling and give it to me full spec, and give it to me NOW!
Seriously, I am buying two. One for the car PC (attaching a 500+ GB external USB hard drive to it, putting an in dash screen), and one for a "Laptop".
You cant beat the power draw, most of my friends Car PCs overheat and shut down, or are literally full-on desktops in their trunks with tons of wires. This beats any of them hands down. I imagine it could even sit behind my dash, and I could have my DVD/Navigation unit sit right where it is, and hook this up to it's aux-in as well as some drop down screens in the back with a splitter. I'd need a splitter anyway to hook it into my DVD/Nav because its only got one aux in (A/V) and my PS3 takes that. Now you want to talk about overheating, take a gander at a PS3 modded underseat in a car. The one for the car wont need the webcam or extended battery, but I need the gig of memory, and I'd like the full 8GB SSD. Oh well, I shall be dropping $800+tax when they finally come out.
Anyway, Asus, SET A FRICKEN RELEASE DATE!
Keep in mind that the $199 price for the cheapest model. But the cheapest model isn't going to be available for us to buy anyway. So yes it is more expensive, but part of that cost is because of it being a different model with higher specs.
Is the cheapest model 2g surf that is $199?but i cannot get to it anywhere. Where can i get it?only in Taiwan?
Welcome to the US dollar... that's the real reason. $358 USD from 11,669 Taiwan Dollars is really only 175 Pounds Sterling. That's actually quite cheap if you're earning your salary in that currency, or say 250 EURO.
just saying...
Don't I know it... I was in Germany for 5 years as a kid (Army brat) during the 80's -- back when the US dollar was a crazy strong currency. $1 got you DM3.45 (Deutsche Marks, German money) and 1 Pound, 6 (pence?) -- whatever, 1.5 British Pounds.
Now US dollars are worth less than both Mexican and *Canadian* Pesos... FFS!
Yeah, I *love* that we're a debtor nation now -- $40 Trillion in real debt. That equates to $440,000 per American household. Awesome.
...and let's not have any libs come on and try to blame it on Bush and the war. It's much bigger than that! The US used to be a majority provider of engineering and intellectual prowess to the World stage. Now we outsource for brainpower while we provide the world all the movies & music & sports that it needs. Not that we've no major innovations, because clearly we do, just that we're slipping where it comes to leading in production and engineering.
All that to say -- if more frickers would get engineering degrees and our government would stop outsourcing for talent and develop homegrown ability, we'd be able to buy international stuff cheaper.
Gleefully derailing the discussion, I'd like to submit the theory of at least one prominent economist (whose name escapes me), which is that our foreign debt should be viewed like our personal debt -- a sign of strong growth. You don't look at a guy who has a mortgage on his house and say he's poor, right? I mean, everybody buys houses on credit and pays off on a plan. Well, at the national level, it's a bit different, because while the life cycle of personal debt is to buy the house, pay it off over time, then keep living in it till we die; as a nation, we don't have that end-game to work towards, so it pays off to keep a certain level of debt all the time. The important thing to look at in that case is not the debt but the *rate at which the debt is increasing*.
Let's put it another way. Don't look at what our per-capita debt numbers are. Look at the rate of return each party gets on the debt. Our creditors get a modest mid-single-digit return on their money (whatever the going rate on a t-bill might be right now). We get the amount they invested to use as capital. The debate, therefore, should focus on whether we're getting our money's worth out of the mid-single-digit interest rate we're paying on our debt, not on whether the absolute debt amount is too hight.
The place where people get scared is conflating (incorrectly) national debt with debt you owe to a mobster. The difference is, national debt is not going to get "called in" like a mob mark, and there's this sudden panic to raise enough money to "cash out". Say e.g. China decided tomorrow that they wanted to stop lending us money. It would be a global disaster for everybody, China included -- we could refuse to pay, or print more money, but the US government is hardly going to just send around to collect that $440,000 each, door-to-door. Either way, China gets a bum deal, so they'd never be crazy enough to do it.
I've rambled enough now, but if you get anything out of this post, it should be that big scary debt numbers don't mean a lot in real life.
@James:
> Our creditors get a modest mid-single-digit return on their money [...]
> big scary debt numbers don't mean a lot in real life.
Until creditors get scared off and either don't lend you any more money, or those single-digit interest rates take a huge hike. Take the recent (current?) real estate fiasco for example. Quite a few foreign banks got burned or even bankrupted, to the point where--if they survived--they will be much more caution in lending money to US institutions. If German or British families lose their savings because of their bank's risky investments, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be much more scrutiny on investments in the future.
@DorianGray:
> and let's not have any libs come on and try to blame it on Bush and the war.
No, that would only account for a few of the trillions, not all. There are many reasons for why that is so, and not all of them have to do with the US doing anything wrong in particular. Rather, the rest of the world has become more competitive and is catching up with the US, sometimes even overtaking it. In particular, Europe and Asia are eating big parts of the lunch that used to belong to the US. In the time frame you mentioned the slow and weary machinery of the EU finally started to pay handsome dividends, propelling nations such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland from essentially third world nations into the front row of economic and social growth. What the EU did for Europe, globalization did for the entire planet, but especially Asia. Remember Korea in the 80s? Right, not much happening there. Then, all of a sudden (if you can call the 90s sudden), brands like Samsung and LG became first tier, while the US pretty mcuh stopped producing consumer electronics.
If you want to blame the US for anything, perhaps do so for over-zealous outsourcing and the loss of competencies it once had. Then again, the same can be said about other "first world" economies, but it seems that the pendulum is slowly coming to a halt, if not swinging in the other direction. There are indications that some companies that eagerly shifted their production to Asia or Eastern Europe realized that truly saving money in the long run while preserving brand value takes a lot more than cheap labor, and are either slowing or reversing this trend.
The model ASUS is currently pushing into the market is indeed around $358USD, but the entry-level one is said to be (though we haven't seen it around yet) 7999NTD, or about $250USD.
When they offer it for WHAT THEY ADVERTISED $199 I'll get one, not until then.
Like any consumer, I don't trust a company that lies to us.
You don't trust anyone, then?
Well considering a lot of companies do lie to customers, I shouldn't be too mad. It is just like the OLPC project. Once the manufacturers found out they "could" increase the prices for components and make more money, then did. This ultimatey leads to consumers not trusting companies... Well I for one learned my lesson years ago.. Don't belive it until you can buy it officially when they start quoting "Prices". :) Thanks Ass-us!!
900 mhz celeron... atleast that's what it said on one of the other EeePC posts.
I'm pretty sure if you look around you can get something that has a bigger screen and a better processor for around $400 used.
N30 and everybody else:
You aren't getting the point of this lappie. Yes, for $400 you can go out and get a much better laptop. But you won't find one that's
A: as small
B: as durable
C: as fast (laptops wait on their hard drive far more than their CPU)
D: as good battery life
E: as cool (temp)
F: as cool (awesome)
I'll probably trade my 12" core 2 for one of these puppies. A good streamlined linux distro on an SSD drive will be amazing for office and internet work on the go. Even my ultraportable Core 2 heats up and takes too long to boot to be enjoyable to just grab and go.
Eee PC for me!
What makes you think this machine will be fast? I seriously doubt that ASUS is using a "true" SSD drive. Rumor has it that they have just taken some flash memory and sodered it to the mother board. At this price, esp. condsidering the cost of the display is $30, what makes you think that ASUS would spent the money for a "true" 2.5" SSD. In addition, from what I've read, the SSD is not user replaceable, unlike a "true" SSD. The speed of this machine may well lie in how much they spent on flash memory and how fast the access times are.
Otherwise, I agree with what you are saying.
> Rumor has it that they have just taken some flash memory and sodered it to the mother board.
You could be right, but not necessarily. Rumors were that the storage held it up and drove up the price (beside the display mentioned here). If it truly used generic flash, that's quite cheap and plentiful and would make it quite easy to offer 8GB without breaking a sweat. Just thinking out loud here...
and by "better" in the $400 segment I mean a boring 15.4" celeron with a super slow 40 gig hard drive, 1-2 hours battery life, etc.
Sure, it would make a better "only" computer, but the Eee is my choice for a 2nd computer.
I'll wait till the second revision comes out next year, lower power, better specs, presumable same price, can't go wrong with that.
Would make a great office assistant, or for schoolwork and such without adding a 8 lb monster to your backpack. I'm all for it.
i agree ill wait for the 2G Eee or just get the nokia 8100?
Nokia N810*
The one thing in the spec I don't like is the low res video cam. I'm really tempted to get the cheapest model available (by mail order from Hong Kong if necessary), upgrade the ram and then duct tape a 250Gb 2.5" USB drive and a solar panel to the case.
There's a low cost device, just a little bigger than the OQO, in there somewhere. An Uber PDA in that space between PDAs and tiny laptops but this still isn't it.
I hear the ram is soldered to the board, not very upgradable
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3829
Actually, the new Nokia N810 appeals to me more. I am an OQO 02 user, and it has completely unshackled me from larger notebook PC's...which have gone back to the size of laptops rather than notebooks. The one downside of the OQO is that its Wifi range is pretty pathetic. It's easily tethered to my Treo via PDANet, though, so that helps make up for it.
Yup 350 dollars or 175 GBP is actually around 1 days wage for me, but of course short of importing it and hoping the customs don't jump on the package you'll never see it for that price in the UK, cos they know that's too cheap.
$500 Foleo with a 10" screen does not look so expensive now...
Anyone remembers IBM z50? My old employer used to issue them to us and while I couldn't justify spending $900 at that time I still think that was one of the greatest gadgets ever...
The newly raised priced helped me decide on ordering a N800($226) last week. I'd have gobbled up the Eee at $199.
I can probably run Team Fortress 2 on this baby. ;-)
Will this bad-boy be able to run BackTrack linux (probably with fluxbox instead of kde/gnome) and what chipset is the wifi nic (atheros, orinoco, etc...) it would be an awesome auditing laptop if it had a linux happy chipset for the wifi... =D
I went to bestbuy yesterday looking to ask someone about which ones they're gonna get and how many, so after a couple of minutes the assistant manager of the computer department came up to me and asked me if I neded any help. I asked him what I came to ask and he just stared at me with this blank look. I had to say EEE like 4 times for him to understand what I was talking about but he still didn't know. I started to get a bit frustrated at that point so I asked him if he knew about the OLPC at which point he said No so I just walked away.
Your first mistake was going to Best Buy.
It all went to the shitter after that.
whats the problem with the base model going up a hundred dollars...........arentu gonna buy the better model anyways?
HEY everyone, I've been hanging out at eeeuser.com following this little beauty.
A couple users uploaded pictures of the interface on the Eee and I built a little Online Test Drive for the Eee.
Check it out at: http://www.honeypothack.com/eee/internet.htm
-Josh