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-
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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.
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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."
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