Intel Touts Cheap Laptops and Even Cheaper Tablets for the Holidays

It'll be less about the low prices and more about minimizing the tradeoff between performance and battery life.

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Over at VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi quotes Intel’s new-ish CEO Brian Krzanich as saying “he expects $99 tablets, $299 Haswell laptops, and $349 2-in-1 hybrid tablets and laptops” for the holiday shopping season.

Intel’s worked to further bridge the tradeoff chasm between performance and battery life with its latest round of processors: The company’s Bay Trail chips, part of the Atom system-on-a-chip line, are finding their way into tablets, inexpensive laptops and other devices with tight quarters under the hood. The line of Haswell processors are finding their way into higher-end laptops, with early reviews of Haswell-based machines earning high marks for long battery life.

To find a laptop priced south of $300 isn’t a total anomaly by any means; nor is finding a sub-$100 tablet. The hope here is that this next wave of affordably-priced gadgets might offer fewer performance and battery-life tradeoffs than generations past.

Intel says hardware bargains to multiply this fall: $99 tablets, $299 Haswell laptops, $349 2-in-1 hybrids [VentureBeat]