In September I wrote that the cheap laptop was a category rather than a compromise, and that the danger was competitors copying the price and the screen size while throwing away the restraint that made the Eee PC work. Four months on I would like to report that I was wrong. I cannot.
The Eee sold. Asus has been vague about numbers in the way companies are vague when the number is embarrassing in a good direction, and stock has been hard to find in most of Europe since November. So the thesis held: there is a real market for a small, fast-booting, cheap machine that does four things well.
Now come the responses, and they are following the script almost exactly.
The pattern is a nine inch screen instead of seven, Windows XP instead of the Linux launcher, and a conventional hard disk instead of flash. Each of those three swaps is individually defensible. A nine inch screen is genuinely easier to read. Windows XP means your existing software runs. A hard disk means eighty gigabytes instead of four, at lower cost per gigabyte.
Together they undo the machine.
XP on a low-clocked Celeron with a gigabyte of memory is not a snappy experience, and it needs the hard disk because the install alone will not fit in flash at prices anyone will pay this year. The hard disk brings back the spin-up delay, the mechanical failure point, and the power draw, which means a bigger battery or a worse runtime. The bigger screen brings a bigger chassis. Add it up and you have a machine that weighs half again as much, boots in forty seconds instead of fifteen, and costs a hundred dollars more.
That is not a cheap laptop. That is a bad laptop, and buyers can tell the difference even when reviewers score it on a spec sheet.
What I did not anticipate in September is that Asus would do this too. The newer Eee models are drifting up in screen size and configuration, and there is talk of an XP option. I understand why. The retail channel asks for Windows because retail staff know how to sell Windows, and the margin on a four hundred dollar machine is thin enough that you take the volume where it is offered.
Still, it means the company that found the category is being pulled back toward the thing the category was a reaction against.
The interesting question for the rest of this year is whether anyone builds the honest version. Something with flash, a lightweight operating system, and a manufacturer willing to say out loud that this machine is for the browser and the mail client and nothing else. That product would be genuinely new. What is arriving instead is a price tier, and price tiers get competed to death within about eighteen months.
I would be pleased to be wrong twice.