Mini Laptops insane prices?

[Lucian_Dragos]

Ok so on a whim I went looking for one of the 7" mini laptops out there like the One Mix line because I miss the netbooks craze from back in the day (still have my Dell Mini10). They where a nice balance between the small ease to carry convenience of a android tablet and the x86 (later x64) power of a laptop...  Well to my shock they cost as much a mid tier full size laptop but with barely low end budget model capabilities... How do these sell for often $700+ USD the lowest I have seen was $450 on eBay with 16 bids and still days to go... I just don't get it. Even (decent) netbooks never hit this poor of price to performance ratio.. I mean I can kind of understand the GPD line because they do have at least some power to back up the price tag, but the others from say One Mix and Chuwi can't say the same. >_>

 

My 15" Lenovo Ideapad 320 with a A12 APU only cost $350 new, almost $150 less and could run rings around a used 1st gen One Mix with the Celeron CPU

[iBabySlapper]

They are too expensive, but I understand why. They're low volume devices, so naturally they need higher margins on every unit to make money.

 

[foldingNoob]

i think tablets and 5" phones killed them

[TheSLSAMG]

Honestly even the GPD machines are overpriced. You're paying for a niche form factor which almost no one wants or finds useful. I think they're really interesting and I'd love to have one, but $885 for the GPD Win Max vs $900-$1000 for a GTX 1660 Ti equipped laptop is no contest. Obviously not a fair comparison if form factor is your main concern, but for most people it isn't that much of a concern. 

 

I had a Shield Portable (Android but same concept), the original thiccboi from 2013 that looked like an Xbox controller with a clamshell. I loved that thing so much but the game library was weak outside of emulation (though having Portal was really cool). While the game library is bigger with Windows in theory, the amount of games that will actually run at reasonable settings at 30 FPS stable is small outside of older games, indie games and side scrollers. I'm willing to give a little bit on graphical fidelity, but almost $900 should get me better than that.

Also I'm an Apple (and Nintendo) slave so paying too much is normal to me.