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Acer VP: 'We're never gonna give netbooks up, let them down, run around and desert them'
Acer's no stranger to netbooks: it knows the rules and so does vice president Scott Lin, who has said that a full commitment's what he's thinking of. It comes in the wake of Samsung running around and deserting baby-laptops for ultrabooks, but Acer's never gonna say goodbye. Well-off westerners might be obsessed with slates, but emerging markets like China, India and Indonesia prefer the cheaper units. The company's plan is simple -- what it doesn't make in profit on individual units, it'll make back in the sheer volume of units sold. Last quarter Acer sold one point seven million of the things, comfortably ahead of second-placed ASUS and third placed Samsung -- the latter decided it wasn't gonna play the game anymore.
Acer not making a tablet, will focus on ultra-thin laptops
We're sort of loving Acer's new bad-boy vibe -- not only have company execs recently gone on record saying that US PC manufacturers will be dead within 20 years and that they want to "change the Microsoft-Intel environment" with Chrome OS, but now they're standing firm while everyone else races to do a tablet. At least that's the word from Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin, who told Digitimes that while Acer can certainly produce a tablet device, it doesn't fit into the company's business model. What's more, he doubts that other companies can simply copy Apple's hardware and succeed -- instead, Acer's going to focus on ultra-thin laptops, a category Acer expects to account for 20-30 percent of its business this year. Lin also said Acer will introduce some new models that are less then 2cm (.7 inches) thick -- assuming there's an ARM-based Chrome OS netbook in that mix, we can certainly see the super thin and light laptop category and the tablet category aligning as direct competitors in the near future.
