Netbook pricing

When guest starring on the ZATechshow this past week we discussed the issue of Netbook pricing in South Africa but I thought I would expand a little further on the issue as Netbooks inexplicably fascinate me. The point of a Netbook is to be cheap and relatively simple. I wont go into how the manufacturers of Netbooks have ruined the category by making things overly complicated but I will go into the exorbitant pricing in South Africa.

Let’s run the numbers:

MSI Wind: According to Amazon the 3-cell battery MSI Wind costs $359 or R3600. It’s not dirt cheap but you’re getting a 120 gig hard drive and a gig of ram. Here in South Africa you’re looking at R4800 from the exceptionally well priced LaptopDirect.co.za. Remember, if you bought any of these Netbooks in a store they would cost even more. I just don’t understand where the extra R1200 comes from? I cannot believe that it costs an extra $120 to bring the Netbook into South Africa. Before I continue, I don’t want you thinking Laptop Direct is ripping people off when infact they’re actually one of the few places in South Africa selling hardware at an excellent price.

Dell Mini 9: The Dell is technically not available in South Africa (at least not according to the Dell.co.za website) but you can get it from Kalahari.net. Directly from Dell in the U.S. the equivalent machine (1 gig of ram and an 8 gig SSD drive) is $375 while Kalahari is selling it for R5500. What we’re looking at is a discrepancy of over R1750 for the same machine. I’d personally love a Dell but at that price I cannot see a reason to buy.

Acer Aspire One: The Aspire One is the cheapest mainstream Netbook internationally and continues that trend locally. The basic version of the Aspire One costs $329 from Amazon but somehow costs R3000 in South Africa from Incredible Connection. I’m not sure if this is a typo or a real offering but it seems as though Incredible really wants to shift units of this machine. The issue though is the more expensive version with Windows and a hard drive costs $379 while locally the cheapest one can find it is again at Incredible Connection that sells it for R5500. Again that’s a fairly large price difference of R1200. It seems the Aspire One is the cheapest Netbook in the country.

I’ve ignored the likes of the Asus EEE and the HP Mini 2133 range as they’re not really available locally and in the case of the HP are no longer available overseas for a price comparison. It can be said that the HP costs a whopping R8000 for the top of the range model. Maybe I’m wrong but that seems hardly in a Netbook category.

Sure I understand we live in the middle of nowhere but realistically how much extra can it cost to ship these units here? R500 extra per unit? I’m just saying that not only are we being ripped off but what the importers are doing with their massive markups is to ruin the category in our country. We’re not seeing the HP Mini 1000 series, we still haven’t seen any of the Asus range after the 700 series and the likes of Toshiba and Samsung are nowhere to be found. The reason for this is simple: no one is going to buy a Netbook when you can buy a reasonable full sized laptop for the same price or even less in some cases. Whoever is pricing Netbooks is killing the market purely for some short term profit and I think that’s pretty darn selfish.

So wise up Netbook importers and bring pricing down to a reasonable level. I must applaud Acer for the extremely low price of the Aspire One 8 gig model. It’s cheap and cheery and that’s what we should be aiming for with this category of hardware.

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