Acer drops notebook prices
Following the lead of other vendors, Acer America drops the prices on its notebooks by up to 11 percent.
Nearly every major notebook vendor has dropped its prices recently. Yesterday, for example, Hewlett-Packard cut prices on its HP OmniBooks by up to 17 percent on nearly all models. Toshiba and Apple (AAPL) announced similar cuts only days before.
"It's a competitive issue," said Matt Sargent, an analyst at Computer Intelligence. "Competition is getting tight between Toshiba, HP, and Compaq, and that is driving down everyone's prices."
Acer dropped the price of its TravelMate 7060 from $4,499 to $3,999, an 11 percent reduction.
Acer purchased the notebook manufacturing and marketing arm of Texas Instruments (TI) in January and continues to sell TI notebooks under the TravelMate brand name.
The TravelMate 7060 contains a 166-MHz Pentium MMX microprocessor, 32MB of RAM, and a 2GB hard drive. Meanwhile, the TravelMate 7063NT, which runs Windows NT and contains a 3GB hard drive, was dropped from $5,299 to $4,799, an 8 percent decline.
The company also cut prices on its Extensa notebooks. The 610CD dropped $200, from $1,999 to $1,799; the 610CDT went from $2,599 to $2,399. Both notebooks contain 150-MHz Pentium processors.
In addition, Acer cut prices on its higher-education Extensa versions, the ESS2 and ESS3, by about 5 percent, to $1,949 and $2,449 respectively.