Black Friday 2008 – The war of the $199 netbook?
While the trend towards netbooks (small, low-powered, generally linux based, laptops) has been increasing over the last year, something happened over the last week or so that has really been interesting to me. As we get closer and closer to this year’s Black Friday, generally a source of ridiculously good deals for those early holiday shoppers, I’ve noticed the prices on netbooks begin to plummet.
It started last week with Best Buy offering the Asus Eee Pc 900a for $299:
For a netbook that was previously going for around $450, this is already a great deal, and we’re not even at Black Friday yet. But the price war is continuing already with Buy.com offering an Acer Aspire One netbook for only $309. Not as good of a deal as Best Buy, but it is indeed a significant reduction from the original price.
Something makes me think that a lot of the retailers out there are going to drop the prices on these netbooks to around the easy to justify $199 mark to bring in shoppers in this otherwise terrible retail season.
It’s amazing to think that only a few years ago we were talking about the prospect of the $199 DESKTOP as being an amazing thing. Now we just might be on the cusp of the $199 LAPTOP. Hell at $199, I’d even buy one just for the hell of it.
Tags: Acer, Asus, Eee Pc, Linux, netbook, XP