Will businesses and consumers spring for a Windows 8 hybrid priced at $849 that's powered by a relatively pokey Atom processor?
(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)
Windows 8 PC sales aren't trending well, according to a new report. And consumers' addiction to low cost may be a factor.
A blurb on Friday from the NPD Group said
Windows 8 holiday sales continue to not impress.
"The launch of Windows 8...did little to boost holiday sales or improve the yearlong Windows notebook sales decline," NPD said.
More specifically, Windows laptop "holiday unit sales" were down 11 percent year-to-year, NPD said.
Want more deets? The average selling price of a Windows laptop rose a hair -- $2 to $420, NPD said.
Meanwhile, the average selling price of a MacBook rose almost $100 to $1,419 on a sales drop of 6 percent.
Upshot: Both Windows lappies and MacBooks saw a sales drop, but Apple made a $100 average selling price gain versus a couple of bucks for Windows.
Maybe a bigger part of the Windows sales problem is that the mix of systems has changed compared with the glory days of
Windows 7.
That is, Windows 7 was accompanied by a crush of ultracheap netbooks, according to an analysis at the Supersite for Windows -- which had some harsh words for netbooks.
"Many of those 20 million Windows 7 licenses each month -- too many, I think -- went to machines that are basically throwaway, plastic crap. Netbooks didn't just rejuvenate the market just as Windows 7 appeared, they also destroyed it from within," Paul Thurrott wrote.
"Now consumers expect to pay next to nothing for a Windows PC. Most of them simply refuse to pay for more expensive Windows PCs."
And, by the way, shipments of systems powered by Intel's power-efficient-yet-slow Atom chip -- the same class of processors used in netbooks -- are barely a trickle at this point. And to make matters worse, some, like the $849
HP Envy x2, are priced way above the $399 netbooks of holiday seasons past.
Windows laptop sales sink -- but that's just part of the problem
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Windows laptop sales sink -- but that's just part of the problem
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Windows laptop sales sink -- but that's just part of the problem
