Prices fall by Mike Musgrove and Nicholas Johnston The Washington Post Murphy Meng already had a computer. But then last week he went and bought a second PC. Not an other desktop like the one he has at home. Meng, 28, bought what more and more Americans have been buying, a laptop. Desktop computer sales remained flat in recent years, even dropping 4 percent over the last quarter. But laptop sales have boomed--up 9 percent over that quarter, according to market researchers Gartner Dataquest. And laptop sales are expected to keep climbing in the coming years, growing twice as fast as desktops'. Computers you can carry in your briefcase still account for less than 30 percent of all computer sales, but their latest growth surge comes not from travel ing salesmen or road-warrior corporate types. Regu lar consumers are snapping up portable computers now, according to Charles Smulders, a vice presi dent at Gartner Dataquest. This is happening in spite of laptops' higher prices -their average selling price of $1,548 is almost twice the figure for desktops of comparable performance, ackl ording to NPDTechworld. But a growing number of manufacturers have dis- ered something that can both narrow that price • and make almost every computer user a poten laptop convert: Many consumers only need "out to outlet" portability. These are generally not the d warriors but home users, who do their comput in a handful of fixed locations, all of which have ewer outlet. at realization has led to a curious hybrid ma ine. Starting this year, many companies have been ilding laptops around standard Intel Pentium 4 ktop processors. Desktop processors cost less than 'bile processors, so the resulting designs have .ught forth a whole new class of cheaper laptops It deliver performance close enough to a desktop's tempt many buyers. "The only thing you can't do (on a laptop) right w is DVD creation," said Andy Klopstead, : teway's marketing manager for mobile products. opstead said laptops are even catching on among ers--a subset of computer users who once steered ar of laptops but who are now attracted to the pos- will "following positions this semester: - distribution manager - assistant news editors - assistant sports editors - supplement page editors Most positions can be taken for credit or are paid sss. -Looks great on a resume! it E-mail: behrcolls@aol.com 6s a The Behrend be looking to fill the Attn: Rob Wynne -or- call the Beacon office at 898-6488. as laptop systems gain power sibility of using wireless networking to go head-to head against their friends. The trade-off is that these low-priced, high-pow ered machines usually exhibit shorter battery life. "Desktop processors eat up power like there's no tomorrow," said Alan Promisel, a technology ana lyst with tech research firm IDC. He estimates that laptops with desktop processors get about 1 1/2 hours' worth of life, compared with the three or four hours that processors optimized for laptops get from the same battery. Some manufacturers are using more powerful bat teries to compensate for power-sucking processors-- at an additional cost in dollars and weight. Dell puts more powerful batteries in its laptops that use desktop processors. "We wanted to preserve that three-hour threshold in battery life," said Ketan Pandya, Dell's marketing manager for consumer notebooks. Not everyone agrees that's necessary for all ma chines. "There is a different set of requirements when you Beacon NATI N. 14)6 M a Avis Friday, August 30, 2002 look at commercial versus home buyers, - said Brett Faulk, director of consumer product marketing for notebooks at Hewlett-Packard. "Consumers are more forgiving than corporate or commercial users about battery life, size and weight." HP's conclusion, said Faulk, is that battery life doesn't matter as much if most of your time on the laptop is going to be spent within reach of an outlet. And most home buyers of laptops are far more con cerned with computing power than with battery life. That was the issue facing Brittney Matthews and her mother one recent afternoon as they looked at laptops at CompUSA in Rockville, Md. Matthews, 17, is starting college in the fall and wants to take a computer with her. Her mother "wants it to be light," Matthews said, "but I want it speedy." Promisel, however, criticizes the way PC makers put desktop processors into laptops without inform ing consumers of the corresponding hit in battery life, calling it a "car-salesman technique." But he con cedes, "If you know what you're getting into, it's a The Behrend Beacon great deal." Laptop makers aren't exactly trumpeting the news lurking inside some of their products. You can iden tify a hybrid if its processor isn't specifically de scribed as "mobile" or if its name isn't followed by an "M"--for instance, "Pentium 4-M." It's too early to tell whether these hybrid laptops will stay welcome on the laps and desks of consum ers. But it's a big market, with a variety of needs. Sony, for example, has five types of laptops, ranging from the lightest road warrior model to heavier desk top replacements. While the desktop market may be somewhat satu rated, there's still room for laptops to grow. The rise of cheap, relatively simple wireless networking may lead to laptops taking an even bigger chunk of the computer market down the line. Wireless network ing may still be the realm of the early adopter, but it seems to be catching on: Klopstead said that a quar ter of Gateway customers opt to have wireless capa bility added to their laptops, up from 5 percent six months ago. While there may be cool developments in the fu ture, there are some good deals out there today. Dan de Grandpre, chief executive of the bargain-hunting Web site Dealnews.com, said he has seen "ridicu lously aggressive" deals from Dell this summer and many sales from Hewlett-Packard on both HP- and Compaq-branded laptops. A series of deals on laptops from Dell, HP and Compaq have stayed in the top 10 of Dealnews.com's "reader picks" for most of the summer. One current deal for a Compaq Presario alerts readers to mail-in rebates totaling $250--taking the price of a notebook from $1,099.99 down to $849.99. Price anxieties eventually drove Matthews and her mom home from CompUSA empty-handed as they pondered extra features, and warranties to cover the computer at school. De Grandpre, on the other hand, liked the offers he was seeing on his site so much he recently took the plunge. He purchased a laptop for his office, even though he has already experienced a slight twinge of buyer's remorse at the sight of other deals that were just as good or better. "You have to accept that the great deal you got today will be beat in the next seven days," he said. "But you still got a great deal." Page
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