Intel is
slowly becoming the victim of its own Atom success. At the beginning, the Asus Eee PC
was small, cheap, 7-inch thing that could run some internet apps and word processing.
Things changed in 2008 and 2009 and today, netbooks are 10-inch machines, almost
big enough for pleasant work for more than few hours, with a bit better battery
life and decent storage.
All these
new features are getting netbooks to price and performance level of a notebook,
and this is becoming a big headache for Intel and its partners. It is hard
differentiate netbooks as they are almost the same, companies such as Asus, MSI,
Acer or Dell simply slightly change the design and most of them copy all the
good features that can come from the netbook platform.
The big problem is
that notebook sales are beginning to suffer at the hand of netbooks, and Asus and MSI want to charge consumers €550 and €699 for Atom based Macbook Air replicas, which is basically the price of a real notebook
The bottom
line is that Intel’s average selling prices are doomed due to the recession, and they
simply have to go down as Intel makes less money on a $70 Atom then on a $200 Core 2
mobile CPU. Intel wants to limit Atom based netbooks to the €300 price range, while partners want
to sell them for as much as they can.