$149 Laptop!!

Yeah, you read it right, a brand new laptop for $149 and no, its not that $100 laptop I’m mentioning!! I’m talking about a 1.5Ghz Celeron M powered, 15″ Toshiba laptop with 256MB RAM and 60GB Hard Drive that CompUSA was selling for $149 last Sunday at its retail stores, as c|net reported.

The laptop which usually costs about $749 at retail vanished off the shelves of CompUSA stores as they sold all 7500 of those in 2 hours, even though the offer was for 16 hours!! And the pretty thing was that there were just 30 units on sale at each retail store!! :d-oh: But you might wonder what was the catch, there’s got be some, there’s noway such a good thing can happen without any strings attached, even at Christmas time!! And if you think that ….. then how right you are!! :dizzy:

The deal was that the buyer would need buy an AOL subscription for a year!! So the total cost that each buyer had to pay for those subsidised notebooks was $450, the figure was arrived at by deducting a $50 instant rebate and $250 instant savings for signing up for AOL, from the $749 retail figure. After that the buyer would be available for $300 mail-in rebate from CompUSA, thus bringing the effective cost of the laptop to $149. But that’s not kewl if I may say so, as from what I’ve heard, an AOL connection is pretty crappy & one wouldn’t want it even for free, let alone pay for it!! So those who did not want the AOL deal bundled with this, they had the option to get the laptop for $399, which altogether is a good deal in my opinion as you are still gonna save $350 on that notebook!! :tup:

Along with is deal, CompUSA was also offering Compaq desktops powered by AMD Sempron for $99.99 bundled with similar deals and discounts and that came with a 17″ CRT, 256MB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive & a CD-RW drive. But unlike the notebooks, the desktops found less takers and weren’t sold out. CompUSA executive Vice President and General Merchandising Manager Brian Woods said that more such deals are likely to follow!! :tup:

Goodness, I simply can’t wait for such deals to being offered here by retailers. :pray: A decent configuration laptop for about Rs.6727(current rate being Rs.45.15/USD)?? People would certainly go crazy over here and notebooks would become the next FAD!! :hug: Though that’s wishful thinking, I doubt its gonna realise anytime soon!! :think: