Windows 8 notebooks aren’t selling partly due to price - upchurchsucken

Windows 8 notebooks on the face of it didn't create a lot of cheerfulness around the Christmas tree this vacation season.

Marketing research firm NPD says while shoppers started off strong, their buying dropped dispatch throughout the rest of the season for an total gross sales decline of 7 percentage compared with 2011. The firm blames Windows 8, in parting.

"Despite the ballyhoo, and hope, around the set in motion of Windows 8, the new operational system did small to advance holiday sales or improve the year-long Windows notebook sales decline," NPD aforesaid in a statement Friday.

The Port Washington, N.Y.-based firm said Windows notebook holiday unit gross sales dropped 11 percent, on par with Dishonorable Friday, and similar to the yearbook trend, but revenue trends weakened since Black Fri to goal the holiday period behind 10.5 percent.

The average sale cost of touchscreen notebooks was about $700 and accounted for only 4.5 percent of Windows 8 gross revenue — a disappointment for Microsoft and its partners, considering the OS is optimized for touch.

On Supersite for Windows, Paul Thurrott unpacks NPD's Book of Numbers a number farther and says the reason Windows 8 is sputtering is because people got wont to to tiptop cheap netbooks, which helped account for the 20 million Windows 7 licenses Microsoft was merchandising a calendar month during the three-year run of the OS. Compare the $400 average selling price of a non-mite-enabled Windows notebook with the average selling price for a Macbook and you'Ra looking at a $1,000 departure.

"It's non pat to say that the Windows PC market went for volume over quality, because it did: Many of those 20 billion Windows 7 licenses every month — too many another, I think — went to machines that are basically bill, plastic crap. Netbooks didn't just regenerate the market just as Windows 7 appeared, they also destroyed information technology from within: Straightaway consumers expect to pay next to nothing for a Windows PC. Most of them only refuse to pay for more than expensive Windows PCs," Thurrot writes.

Unitary thing that's working against this trend is that people are disposed to pay a bit more for a modest full-sized tablet, namely the iPad and its competitors, including Microsoft's own Control surface. But that's a incompatible form element.

American Samoa for laptops themselves, ideally people World Health Organization privation to get the most away of Windows 8 will ante up for a Thomas More expensive touch-open machine. But will they?

"Years of relying on ungenerous netbook gross revenue to bolster the insecure PC market have colored our perceptual experience of both Windows and the hardware connected which it runs. For Windows 8 to succeed — reach or exceed that 20 million licenses per month digit — the average selling price of touch-supported PCs and devices is going to have to come down," Thurrott writes.

More numbers May endure this view.

At the end of December, vane measuring company Net Applications discharged numbers that showed Windows 8's exercis uptake had slipped rear Vista'Sabbatum the same point in its relinquish.

Even so, expect to see Windows 8 devices everywhere at CES this week .

Maybe all the profile and press that comes from the huge electronics trade read in Las Vegas will microchip away at what appears to personify an entrenched budget-minded consumer mentality.