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Lookout Dell, your chip supplier is making a run at you.

January 9th, 2008 by Grant in: Technology
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Ever heard of an ASUS Eee PC? Yeah, me either.

And the only reason I recognize the ASUS (short for ASUSTek, a Taiwanese company) name is because I looked into building my own desktop PC a while back. ASUS is one of the largest manufacturers of motherboards, found in Sony Playstations, Apple MacBooks, Dells, and even a few HP computers.

And by the way, they also make computers. Small ones. Real small ones.

ASUS EeeThe ASUS Eee PC has a 7″ screen, so it’s truly a portable computer, and sells for under $500. Its got about 1 gig of RAM and 8 gig of hard drive space. At first glance, this doesn’t sound like much, but that’s because the hard “drive” really isn’t a hard drive, it’s a flash drive.

What’s even cooler is that it doesn’t run on Windows, or run any windows programs for that matter. The operating system and other traditional software programs, like MS Word and Excel, and open source code. Eee runs Linux, which is an open source operating system, and comes standard with OpenOffice, the open source version of Word and Excel (MJ at dyslexicresearch.com explains more about Open Source).

ASUS isn’t a well-known consumer brand, unless of course you’re building your own PC, and the company just started selling them in late 2007. The expect to sell up to a half million units by March (Q1) of this year, and up to 5 million by 2009.

Apple and Dell should be worried, as they have been planning on coming out with their own flash drive mini laptops for quite a while. By the time they finally end up shipping a product, they will have already lost market share to Asus. On top of market timing, Apple and Dell certainly can’t appreciate the pricing pressure their motherboard provider is placing on their new gadgets.

So who’s the real winner in all this, aside from ASUS of course? Intel.

The ASUS Eee PC is powered by the 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M processor. More than that, Intel and ASUS have been buddy-buddy going way back to the 90’s when Intel was having problems with its own motherboards, and ASUS stepped in to help fix the flaw. Ever since then, Intel had a fond respect for the semi-competitive partnership.

So what’s in store for the futurEee?

Evidently, Intel is working on a new processor that will run so efficiently that the Eee won’t even require a fan; it will be completely solid state. You’re laptop will not so much as make a peep, much less a hummmm….

Check out an ASUS Eee Video review, below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMjIW5qyq3s

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One Comment

  1. Money Blue Book
    January 9th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

    One thing I’ve learned about buying PC’s in general…they are all the same internally…thus buy the cheapest one possible. Even the Dell technician that came over to fix my 1 month old brand new Dell PC acknowledged this. Brand name no longer equates to quality in the PC world since most of their internal parts are essentially the same.
    -Raymond

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