Developers Start Hawking Samsung Windows 8 Tablet on eBay
Source: Chuong Nguyen
Just last week at the Build conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft revealed more information about the state of Windows 8 and Windows on a tablet in a post-PC era while at the same time giving the 5,000 or so developers in attendance a free prototype Samsung tablet with Windows 8 pre-loaded running on an Intel Core i5 chip along with one year of 3G mobile broadband access from AT&T. Less than a week later and it appears that those very developer tablets are now appearing on eBay, with one particular tablet fetching $2,700.
While there’s been positive momentum going on around Windows 8, are you excited enough to spend $2,700 on a tablet?
When Microsoft had debuted the Tablet PC class of computing products over a decade ago, promising to revolutionize pen input and the way we use computers, tablets running Windows could run as high as $2,700�Cand often times, systems with the latest Intel chipsets would cost upwards of $1,600-$1,800. Today, in an era where we are treated with sub-$500 Android tablets, liquidated TouchPads fetching as little as $100, and iPads that lead and set the pricing for the industry at $500, anything above $1,000 for a tablet would seem pricey for most consumers.
Tablets running on Windows would most likely have to compete in the same sub-$1,000 price that Windows-based ultrabooks would occupy. It’s unclear if there would be cannibalization between the two separate classes of computing products; Apple had keenly made its tablet a mobile product utilizing a mobile operating system while keeping the MacBook Air a full-fledged PC with a full desktop OS while Microsoft’s strategy would be to place tablet and ultrabook in the same class with the same desktop-grade OS.
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