Acer tablet PC line launching on November 23rd, priced from $299 to $699
Not much more to tell you that you didn't already pick up from the headline. Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci told Dow Jones Newswire that it will be launching its first line of tablet PCs in New York City on November 23rd, priced from $299 to $699 each.
Context & Ripple Effects
Acer's tablet push is the second act of an Android strategy the company laid out in October 2009, when it said at least half of its new smartphones would run Google's OS while keeping Windows Mobile models alive. By March 2010 the vendor had climbed to nearly the number three spot in PCs overall as Dell slipped, and it entered 2010 as the top netbook maker — so this is the volume leader of the cheap-portable era moving into the next category.
The pricing is the telling part: Gianfranco Lanci told Dow Jones Newswire the line will span $299 to $699, and the bottom of that range exactly matches what Acer charged in January 2010 for its Pine Trail-based Aspire One AO532h netbook. The company is effectively bracketing its own netbook business.
First-order effects
- Acer gives US buyers a $299 tablet entry point that sits at the same price as its own AO532h netbook, putting the two form factors head-to-head within one vendor's lineup just before the November 23rd New York launch.
- The $299-to-$699 spread signals a multi-tier line rather than a single flagship, which forces retailers stocking Acer's holiday inventory to choose between shelf space for slates and the netbooks that made Acer number one.
Second-order effects
- Rivals that coordinated Atom N450 netbook launches with Acer in January 2010 — Asustek, Lenovo and MSI — now face the same vendor undercutting netbook pricing with a tablet, pressuring them to field competing slates rather than defend netbook margins.
- If tablets sell at netbook prices, component demand shifts from Atom-class silicon toward ARM-based designs, reshuffling Acer's supplier mix across its portable lines.
Third-order effects
- If the $299 anchor holds across the industry, the netbook — the category Acer led — becomes a transitional product squeezed out of existence between smartphones and sub-$300 slates.
- Vendors' Android strategies would extend beyond phones into every screen size they ship, making Google's OS the default layer of the low-cost portable market rather than one option among several.
The trend: PC vendors are carrying their Android playbook from smartphones into tablets, using slate pricing to cannibalize the netbook category they built.