You make some very good points, which is why I find the eMachine story quite intriguing.
When Dell first started with PC's Unlimited (my first machine was in 1988), it undersold the higher-priced competitors who were unwilling to lower their sales prices for a variety of reasons. That permitted Dell to gain a foothold.
Indeed, even as recently as a couple of years ago, a Dell system was less expensive than a comparably equipped brand name system sold at retail such as at CompUSA.
But something appears to be changing.
eMachines is selling the cyrix-based units and the AMD K2 units under $1,000 are being bought by small businesses, but the really interesting area to me is the Celeron-based CPU's. Here, eMachines is using some quality components, including an ATI Rage AGP with 4 MB RAM, a 5x DVD and a Celeron 366 MHz (soon to be a 433) for $599 (after rebate of $50). I don't really care about keyboards, since I buy an IBM keyboard at CompUSA. They're fairly inexpensive.
Keep in mind that a number of CNET and ZD articles have been noting the shift by small businesses to purchasing Celeron-based systems, which if I understand correctly differ from PII systems in size of cache only (128 vs 512). Is that correct? It just seems to me that one battlefield is shifting, albeit in its early stages. |
