Welcome to the era of the €500 laptop
One of the predictions I humbly made at the beginning of the year (in Computers In Business magazine, link unavailable) was that a standard laptop would cost no more than €500 by the end of 2007.
Looks like this has now happened, with Dell's latest Inspiron pricing. Note that this machine is no slouch on performance either, with Vista, 1GB of Ram and an 120GB hard drive. So what do you get for the extra €275 you're likely to spend in a shop for, say, a HP Pavilion? Is it worth spending the extra money? The main difference seems to be the presence of a dual core chip (the Inspiron has a single-core chip), slightly better graphics card and a 1 year service guarantee (versus Dell's 90 days service warranty). The screen, too, is probably a little better on the HP model (I haven't actually seen Dell's Inspiron yet).
But another €50 gets a dual core chip on Dell. So are the remaining extras worth a 50 per cent extra outlay? It's up to you.
If I were going for a Dell, I'd probably fork out the additional €80 and get the €579 model.
Vista Premium, double the RAM, double the HDD space, better processor, DVD burner and (albeit only slightly) bigger screen.
That said, I'm still dreaming of getting a macbook or macbook pro, even though they're so much more expensive than a Windows-based PC. Fingers crossed on that lotto win, eh?
Posted by: Adam | June 18, 2007 at 07:44 PM