IT Trends on Christmas Wish List
As we rapidly approach the end of yet another year Christmas shopping becomes another daunting task for many. One of the purposes of this column was to keep readers educated on the latest IT trends, to help readers avoid some of the pitfalls of delving into IT and most importantly to help readers save money.
At the shop we have been flat out selling our mainstream laptop models. The most popular is the HP 250 series with a 15.6” screen, an Intel i3 processor, 8GB of ram, a 500GB hard drive. We sell this model with Windows 10 already installed, all of the junk software removed, all of the activations, registrations and updates already done and the latest necessary software already installed. They also have the number entry keypad built into the right hand side of the keyboard.
This model costs $849 and offers all of the benefits of belonging to the Hewlett Packard commercial range – they are extremely well built and come with an onsite parts & labour warranty through HP. No sending it to Brisbane and waiting two months for it to be fixed! However with the Christmas rush we have had numerous enquiries for a smaller ‘tablet’ sized laptop.
Standard tablets such as Samsung Galaxies and Apple iPads are available in screen sizes from around 7” through to 13” with the most common models in the 10” range. These devices are very light and portable however a tablet can only do a limited number of things. One of those limitations is the lack of a proper keyboard for typing more than just a few sentences.
Remote keyboards can be added however these require a separate battery and add further complexity to a solution that was originally designed for simplicity. The other severe tablet limitation is the lack of any real storage space with most of these models having only 32GB or 64GB of storage. If you want to keep a heap of photos then you need to have multiple add in memory cards or a fast Internet link to cloud based storage.
Another Hewlett Packard laptop model that fits into this size / solution arena is the Pavilion x360 series of convertible laptops and there is a particular model which looks pretty attractive. The model I refer to comes with a touch screen of just 11.6” and weighing in at only 1.4kg has an Intel Pentium 4 core processor with a power rating of 1824, 4GB of ram, a 500GB hard drive and they are already running Windows 10.
These ultra-small laptops have a normal keyboard and a screen that can fold around onto the underside of the laptop to turn it into a tablet – the best of both worlds. So how much do we sell this device for? The answer is – we don’t as we currently can’t compete with Officeworks’ pricing on this particular model!
So it is a Hewlett Packard x360 11-K133TU 11.6” Convertible Laptop which has a RRP of $799 on the Australian HP Store website, a RRP of $1099 on another major chain retailers site, a best price of $755.98 on the shopbot site – but a current price of only $622 right now at Officeworks – with Windows 10 already installed!
We have sent several customers to Officeworks to purchase this laptop and then we have charged around $120 to configure it as per our normal laptops above. For a total of $742 our customers have a portable device which is way more powerful / useful than any tablet and just as importantly it is ready and easy to use.
At the end of all of this these laptops have the performance to match their flashy red colour, they boot up and run twice as fast after all of our configs and tweaks plus they offer the same storage capacity as a standard laptop.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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