Monday, October 19, 2009
Netbooks Will Ship With Windows 7 Starter at Retail, and be $50 More Expensive Then Before
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 09:03 AM
There's been copious amounts of speculation on this subject, but it looks like we finally have the answer: it seems most netbooks are going to ship with Windows 7 Starter, not Windows 7 Basic, and the impact (at least in Canada) is a $50 price point jump. Case in point: Future Shop, one of the big-box electronics chains in Canada (owned by Best Buy), is touting their Windows 7 line-up of netbooks. Among them are products from HP, Samsung, and Toshiba. Looking at the HP Mini 110, and comparing them spec to spec, the Windows XP version sells for $299 CAD and it's identical in every way to the Windows 7 version, which will sell for $349 CAD. We've discussed this on the site before, and the hope was that even if the overall price of netbooks went up a bit, there'd be more than just the OS update in there. Perhaps a bump from 1 GB up to 2 GB, or a dual-core Atom processor? No such luck.
So the question becomes, is the license for Windows 7 Starter really $50 CAD more than Windows XP? Highly doubtful - a $50 license fee is in the realm of what HP would pay for Windows 7 Home Premium desktop computer, and we know that Windows 7 Starter isn't going to be the cheap. So is this a case of the netbooks OEMs looking for ways to bump up the price of netbooks to eek out some more profit? It's certainly possible - netbooks have razor-thin margins, and I'm sure HP, Dell, and others would do anything they could to make them more profitable...and a new operating system changes the value proposition for consumers, giving them an opportunity to do so. Read more...
