The notebook prices, at Rs 20-25,000, seem to have bottomed out. In the coming months you won’t see too many vendors harping about ever lower prices of their products. They would already have reaped the benefits of offering lower prices in the last few months.
They would have realized lower prices can’t be sustained for long. They would have realized lower priced models don’t sell as much as those with better USPs – one Korean brand for instance claims 33 USPs in its notebooks including wide-screen models, hot-swappable optical drives, double-spindle HDDs and dual-channel DDR memory. Another vendor was promoting one of its models as an AV station, and had an entire set of – proprietary – tools bundled along. And, the smaller the model the more attractive it is.
Come to think of it, notebooks are much more than lifestyle statements. I have seen so many travel with two bits of baggage, one of which is a notebook.
Also, more than desktops, I foresee notebooks taking the best space in retail showrooms. I won’t be surprised if the many IT malls that are being talked about have entire floors exclusively for notebooks and accessories. This, because of the sheer number of vendors in the notebook space (more than a dozen), many of whom are present in the non-IT lifestyle segment too. If customers don’t see too many desktops when they go out shopping, they may miss buying them too.
Not that desktops are dying. The – look and feel – of a desktop is much lower on the priority list; they sell on performance and utility. Apart from promoting the price of the desktop, how many vendors really let the desktop get its share of fame these days? It could be for no other reason than being politically correct. Also, in a retail setup, I don’t see the desktop as anything more than a lure for pulling in customers into a store.