MSI Wind U115
There was a rumor going around yesterday that the Asus Eee PC T91 would begin shipping immediately. But as I mentioned yesterday, I’ve received confirmation that the much-anticipated convertible tablet style netbook won’t be available in the US until late July. Asus has also posted a note on Twitter saying the same thing. It’s still possible that the netbook could hit other parts of the globe before the US, but don’t expect to find it anywhere in the states this week.
MSI, on the other hand, will be phasing out a much-anticipated netbook at the end of July. The Wind U115 is the first netbook from MSI with a dual hard drive/solid state disk storage solution. The operating system and some program files can be installed on the SSD, leaving the higher capacity HDD for large media files, documents, and other data. When you’re not using the hard drive, the netbook can shut it off to conserve battery power.
But Microsoft has decided not to offer PC makers low cost Windows XP licenses for netbooks with hybrid storage solutions like this. And that means that MSI has to pay a higher price to put Windows on these netbooks than on most of the company’s other netbooks.
MSI has already produced a number of Wind U115 units, and will attempt to sell them off over the next 6 weeks or so. But an MSI representative told me yesterday that the company will stop selling the netbook in the US on July 31st. I’d already heard that MSI was going to stop production soon, but this is the first confirmation I’ve seen that the netbook will only be available for another month and a half in the US.
The MSI Wind U115 is still available while supplies last from the MSI web store, where you can pick it up for $499.99. I haven’t seen it at any other stores yet, and at this rate I’m not sure I expect to.
Can’t they sell it with Linux?!
This has been said before by me and others of course, but this just seems like an unfair marketing practice. Evidently there are no laws or regulations against it, but maybe there should be.
I suppose these practices must be used in other areas of the market, but I can’t think of any off hand. Here’s another of my homespun analogies: I’m not going to sell you my spuds unless you agree not to serve them with chateau brion. You’ll have to buy my Golden Colorado Potatoes for that, at a much higher price.
Another fruit-fly of the month NetBook.
I wonder if they can get a rebate from MS for all their development
and production setup costs? Somebody is going to take a hit on this one.
U115 still available in Poland. SSD only 8GB, HDD 160GB. Processor Z530. I’ve seen none of U115 with 16GB SSD on the market yet, nevertheless they should be somewhere, I guess