Netbooks Find Their Niche – The New Business-user Product
The small screened and underpowered laptops may not be the perfect gaming PC but they’re surely catching on with business users. New programs from the largest wireless carriers are offering the tiny PCs for as little as $99. Are we seeing the future business-user product, or just another fad?
At first, netbooks were the best product for consumers looking for a cheap PC. Now they’re finding their niche with on-the-go types, and are becoming more popular as a result of huge subsidies by cellular carriers to subscribe to their data services.
AT&T first tried a small scale test to see if their program would provide results, and it did. Business users and travelers alike have been flocking to netbooks as an inexpensive way to stay in tune with work and other functions while on the road. AT&T is now taking their netbook program nationwide, offering extreme deals on tiny PCs with a 2 year contract.
Check out AT&Ts netbook offers here.
Of the five netbooks the company currently offers, all but one uses the new Intel Atom chipset. The other utilizes a higher end Intel processor. Either way, every single netbook runs on an Intel processor, this is going to be big for Intel in increasing its profit per PC user.
Netbooks are clearly no longer a fad. Now that they’ve found a niche, which has money and the capability to buy thousands of these machines, it appears that the netbook is here to stay. And the only company truly set to profit on the 2 PC to a person business model is Intel. Netbooks are no longer replacing the demand for PCs, if anything they are a supplement to another, less mobile, PC.
Atom isn’t as expensive as once thought
It was once thought that the Atom processor would come with horrible profit margins, but if anything, the opposite is true. The Atom processor price is falling quickly, as a greater demand for the product helps spread out fixed costs like R&D spending.
The company is also finding additional profitability in its revved up Atom chips, those that perform more like desktop processors, and allow users to do more with their new netbooks. The future could bring netbooks that are high powered, capable of doing the same on a 2.3 pound platform as 20 pound desktops. And that would ring in a whole new crowd of netbook users, and more money, for a chip firm struggling with the grip of recession.
