Skip to main content

$199 Windows 8.1 laptops to reportedly start hitting the market this fall

With Google offering super-cheap computing hardware alternatives to Windows-based devices in the form of Chromebooks, it appears that Microsoft is making more moves to stem the tide of Chrome OS-powered gear. The company reportedly announced that $199 Windows 8.1 notebooks should be available starting sometime this fall.

Microsoft exec Kevin Turner delved into this topic during the 2014 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference keynote address, mentioning that there are already low-priced Windows 8.1 notebooks. To his point, for starters, there’s the Acer Aspire Switch 10, which starts at $379.99, along with the $278 Aspire Aspire ES1, as WPCentral mentioned. Turner reportedly showcased an HP laptop called the Stream, which will be priced at $199 once it launches sometime this fall, though details on the device are nonexistent.

Recommended Videos

For what it’s worth, two of the top five laptops that are on Amazon’s list of best selling notebooks right now are Chromebooks – the $199 Acer C720, and the $199 HP Chromebook 11. The rest are Windows-based notebooks. Though the list is updated hourly, Chromebooks have been topping Amazon’s charts for quite a while.



Amazon Best Selling Notebooks

It’s also worth noting that all of the notebooks in Amazon’s list of top five best selling notebooks are all priced pretty low. The most expensive unit, the Asus Transformer Book T100TA-H1-GR, costs $379. Everything in the top ten, outside of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air ($950), is well under $500. If this list in indicative of anything, it’s this: a lot of people want something that’s cheap, and simply works.

By stating that Windows 8.1-based notebooks priced at $199 should be dropping later this year, perhaps Microsoft has wrapped its head around that notion. However, we’ll have to wait and see what those devices look like once they launch to determine whether they’re worth the bargain basement price.

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Computing Editor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
Adobe Photoshop now runs natively on Windows on ARM, catching up to Apple’s M1
A person using the Surface Pro X.

Photoshop is now fully compatible with Windows 10 PCs like the Surface Pro X that are powered by ARM-based architecture. Adobe announced the news on a support page, noting that as of May 2021, the software now runs natively on 64-bit Windows 10 ARM devices.

Now that Photoshop runs natively on Windows 10 on ARM devices, there should be some performance gains for these Windows users across the board. It no longer runs under emulation, which had severely limited the speed and efficiency of some process-intensive tasks.

Read more
Windows 10 can run better virtualized on Apple’s M1 Macs than on Surface Pro X
everything apple announced at its one more thing event m1 macbook pro 13

 

Windows 10 and some ARM-based Windows 10 apps can perform better when virtualized on Apple's new M1 Macs than it can when running natively on a native ARM-device like the Surface Pro X. That's according to a new video posted on YouTube featuring a benchmarking experience.

Read more
The robot takeover comes another step closer — at Amazon
An Amazon robot working inside one of the company's warehouses.

Amazon is close to having more robots operating inside its warehouses than humans after the e-commerce giant announced this week that it now has more than a million robots working at its facilities around the world.

Over the years, Amazon has spent billions of dollars on the development and deployment of warehouse-based robots, which handle an array of tasks once performed by human workers.

Read more