Popularity of smaller PCs a cause of worry for industry

Paul Mah — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:47:51 -0400

The increasing success of netbooks, which come with little on-board memory and a comparatively slow processor, is apparently starting to worry industry players. Besides posing an outright challenge to the traditional notion of consumers wanting ever more powerful machines, low-cost netbooks also poses a threat to already thin profit margins. Some manufacturers such as Fujitsu are more upfront about the threat, noting that "It's a product that essentially has no margin." Others, like Sony, while admitting that it is investigating what customers want in a second PC, have declared that "We are not looking at competing with Asus." Not everyone is shying away though. For example, Hewlett-Packard recently entered the market with a scaled down notebook it calls the Mini-Note. Would you get a netbook as your primary work machine?

For more on the story:
- check out this article from the New York Times

Thin Profit Margins

Popularity of smaller PCs a cause of worry for industry