You see, there's not much wiggle room when it comes to
netbook pricing. By and large, vendors have priced their machines about as low as they can in order to receive but a sliver of a profit, and there's certainly no way they could eat another $20 to $30 on each unit and still feel good about themselves. To that end, we're hearing that many companies may make their Atom N270 and Atom N280-based netbooks ineligible for the
Windows 7 upgrade (from the factory, anyway), with those always-mysterious "industry sources" pointing to "increasing costs and low consumer demand." In essence, these guys feel as if consumers will view Windows XP as sufficient for those underpowered machines, while it'll be the
Atom N450, Atom D410 and Atom D510 machines that'll be most suited for Win7. 'Course, we suspect you'll be able to pony up for whatever upgrade you'd like once it's in your hands, but we wouldn't anticipate any handouts to suddenly be attached to existing machines.
[Via
GadgetMix]
posted Jun 12th 2009 8:24AM
Microsoft finally found an OS that could move the company forward and finally relegate XP to the dust bin, allowing them to progress onto bigger and better and yet they are killing it with the price.
Not that it bothers me, i have Windows 7 loaded on my Dell Mini 9 and i will be staying on there for good, and it didnt cost me a dime, not even when the RC *officially* runs out *cough*
How are they killing it with the price? They've already announced that Home Premium upgrades will be $49 (and probably even cheaper from places like Newegg). That's as cheap as Windows has ever been, and Windows 7 is certainly worth $50. Over the 3-5 years you're likely to use it, it's like $10-15/year. That's less than a lot of people spend on lunch every day, and/or on coffee every week.
If the manufacturers don't want to build the cost of Windows into their systems, they're free to use Linux. They almost all do, on some systems. However, it's already been shown that consumers are willing to pay a premium, usually $30-50, for Windows on netbooks. I just don't see what they're complaining about.
Yes, some people (like you, apparently) will likely pirate Windows regardless of how little Microsoft charges for it, but Windows 7 is easily worth the price that Microsoft has set.
I think the concern is that the type of license Dell (or any other netbook manufacturer) picked may not be eligible for the Windows 7 upgrade pricing, the article isn't very clear.
Well i will be updating to Snow Leopard when it comes out, just like i updated to Leopard. Leopard cost me $129 and Snow Leopard will cost me about $50 and they dont even have a serial, a piraters dream, but im happy to pay for them.
Windows on the other hand haha. When they make a decent product i will buy it.
Windows is a decent product. If it was really that bad, why would someone such as yourself, with such high standards, bother to use it? Even Vista, regardless of what fanboys have said about it, it was decent. Better than XP, but more hardware-intensive.
Windows 7 is better than decent, and offers a lot of features that you can't access nearly as easily as on other platforms. It's easier for the average user than Linux, and it's cheaper to run than Mac. If it meets your needs, like it does for 95% of people, it's worth the $50 asking price.
My dell mini 9 is running OS X Leopard and it is much faster than XP or Win 7 so i will stick to it. Yes it will not run Snow Leopard but oh well that's not the end of the world.
Give it a few months Snow Leopard will run OSX86 stylee probably much better than Leopard.
funny
i have two mini 9's.
one white one with 32GB runcore ssd and 2gb ram running osx
one black one with 32gb runcore ssd and 2gb ram running win7.
the win 7 one does many thing much faster than the osx one.
the osx one does a few things faster, but not many.
overall, i'd say the win 7 one runs faster, but neither are speed demons.
So you buy a disk and do a clean install, this isn't really news, if you want Windows 7 then buy a netbook with it preinstalled.
In saying that, i think manufacturers are making more money on netbooks than they are letting on.
In Australia before netbooks we could regularly buy a 15" laptop with a more powerful Celeron processor, dvd burner and larger hard drive for $499 to $699.
Now manufacturers have replaced these budget laptops with netbooks which are of course cheaper to manufacture. More powerful $499 laptops have been replaced with crappier $550 netbooks, with 10" models even going up to $850.
It may sound like they are making a lot money when you look at specs but they really arent. Dvd burner doesnt cost mutch, and the price difference between celeron and atom is neclible, as well as hard disks.
Manufacturing costs are about same as making a cheap laptop and slighty more expensive are about the same.
The shrewdest thing netbook makers did was starting to offer it with preinstalled linux. Microsoft can't afford to let linux gain any ground on desktop as even a entry level might get people acquinted with linux. If they started to use it in other machines than netbooks microsoft clientbase would shrink.
"The shrewdest thing netbook makers did was starting to offer it with preinstalled linux. "
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not even close.
as most people who know will tell you, there are more windows based netbooks than linux.
by a very large margin.
even dell reported this to be true.
the reason is simple.
no manufacturer wants to offer a GOOD linux build on their netbooks.
instead of the current Ubuntu version (jaunty) or the netbook specific remix, you get 8.04LTS.
Why?
because it's an LTS, meaning that it won't change for YEARS, instead of every few months and the training to support it, or setting up your special version (Dellbuntu anyone?) isnt a time consuming change it every few months task.
so all the really nifty things that linux geeks want, aren't in the LTS versions, and this also goes to a lot of the "look at that cool thing" gee whiz items that normal users see on a linux geeks laptop and then can't get easily on their netbook.
so most netbooks are sold with windows because it's comfortable, available and in some cases, no more or very little more money.
Netbooks always seemed to me to be the perfect place for Ubuntu/Xubuntu or another distribution that works well with them. The only reason I have XP or windows at home at the moment is because of the good new games easily available for it. If all I wanted was a laptop for browsing / emailing / documents then linux just seems so much of a better choice. Then again I have been known to be crazy.
I think xp is perfect for netbook, win7 is just way too heavy
Agreed.
I ran my Dell Mini 9 with Win7 RC1 (thanks to the tutorials out there!) and while it ran okay and was pretty slick, it DID make things a bit more cumbersome for that lightweight machine.
I've since reverted to XP Pro and it's way snappier doing the same stuff.
My only real regret is that XP doesn't see my Samsung i910 Omnia for it's Internet Connection Sharing tethering over USB, but I'll work that out somehow.
(the wifi tethering works, but is slower and uses battery power rapidly)
Regardless, XP does seem like the best Windows option for resource-limited machines.
Really? my Asus 1000HA runs windows 7 just as fast as XP, I think. The only issue I've ran into is that my HP printer doesn't have windows 7 drivers yet. everything else works great on the netbook, and I hate rebooting into xp.
I'm running 7 on my Aspire One and it has actually been slightly faster than XP, even though memory usage is roughly 2X, as long as you have a gig of ram, you should be fine.
Yeah, I have to go back on that previous statement too. -there were some tweaks I hadn't performed.
Gotta be honest here. I'm going to give Win7 another go, if for no other reason than to get my mobile internet back.
Well...that and the fact that it's just so damn slick. I really like 7.
Thanks for the feedback folks!
I've got both XP and Win 7 on my Samsung NC10, and I haven't noticed anything "heavy" or cumbersome or comparatively slower at all when running 7.
When it comes to space taken up by the OS in hard drive/SSD space and RAM, it's a little excessive. My EEE PC 1000HE runs Windows 7 just fine (as good as XP with all of the little modifications Asus does to it), although it uses a few hundred megs more than XP when idol. When I'm running classic games (most of them are windowed), using Firefox to watch Youtube vids (I stick with standard definition because HD seems to studder), and having a few Office docs open, I use about a gig and a half (tops). I upgraded the RAM, BTW. That's the essential upgrade to boost performance of all future versions of Windows.
I bought an Atom with 1 gb ram with Vista installed from the factory
I must say I'm totally happy, and it's rock solid. I even run Visual Studio 2008 Proffesional on it, with no complaints
That wasn't the netbook manufacturers being shrewd, that was Microsoft being greedy. They weren't going to sell XP for netbooks. When they saw the market taking off without them, they suddenly changed their minds. Think they learned anything from that?
Me either.
Microsoft is the epitome of a company that makes bad decisions, and then scrambles to reverse themselves. This actually makes a lot of sense.
Also, a netbook is not a computer, it is a device. I would never even consider paying a dime more than $250 for one, and more realistically, $200. I'm sorry, but I would use a Netbook as a little carry-around device to check the web and play media. It's basically competing against my smartphone. I feel I'm not alone in my opinion. So to manufacturers, figure out how to do it, or netbooks simply won't survive.
Actually I don't think the netbook will be competing against the smartphone for some time.
Lots of people seem to forget the original target audience of the netbooks, namely the people who just check e-mail, surf the web and type a document now and then.
Before the netbook there was a large percentage of the current users paying a lot of money for something they would never use to its full extent.
Thats also the reason nettops are coming out now.
My father is the perfect example of this, a few years ago he spend close to a €1000 (thats more or less the same in dollars) for a then top-off-the-line PC.
And it served as his electronic solitaire arcade, inbox, and videophone, ok later he learned to print photo's with it but you can still do that with a computer only half its price.
Not to mention its filled with taskbars and screensavers he obviously does not need, if you ever need an argument for Linux this is it.
Besides the custom version of Xandros Asus originally shipped its EEEPC with had a nice and simple tabbed interface.
I doubt the netbook manufacturers pull this off. Its one thing for Microsoft to extend XP to keep linux from gaining a foothold in netbook OS. It's an entirely different situation now that Microsoft has a viable modern OS to use in that market.
I refuse to use XP anymore. I thought that Vista was a pretty decent improvement (from a GUI usability standpoint, anyway) and now Windows 7 is even significantly better than that. The Windows XP GUI is so antiquated at this point that no amount of low-end hardware or cheap price points will ever convince me to use it again.
AWWW... it's so cute.... where does the candy get dispensed from?
My HP Mini 1030NR from Best Buy came with XP and 1GB RAM. It worked foe and I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 RC and that worked fine too although I had , by now, upgraded to 2GB.
I have reverted to XP since the 7 install used up too much of my 16GB SSD. This was the only reason though.
11GB free wasn't enough?
my win7 install on a mini 9 is less than 6 GB total.
I wonder how much it would cost the netbook (can I still use the word netbook?) manufacturers to junk the keyboard, toss in a touch screen and create an Android based tablet?
Google, how's 'bout making that happen?