Windows 8 Touchscreen Laptops See Slow Start - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Eva Dou

One month into the launch of Windows 8, sales are sluggish, say some Asian PC makers – even the ones making the most popular products.

"Demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now," said Asustek Computer Inc. Chief Financial Officer David Chang.

He said the demand ramp-up for Windows 8 touch notebooks was slow and declined to give sales figures for the Asustek Vivobook, even though it's the top-selling Windows 8 touch notebook on Best Buy's website.

Asustek's larger cross-town rival Acer Inc. is closely watching the Vivobook because of its low price — currently $479.99 from Best Buy . The Vivobook comes with an 11.6-inch touchscreen, Intel Core i3 processor, 4 gigabytes of memory and a 500-gigabyte hard drive.

In an internal email to other notebook department staff this month, an Acer manager wrote that the low price of their competitor's Vivobook has the potential to make touchscreen laptops more "popular." He noted that touchscreen laptops only account for less than 20% of shelf space at the moment because of their high price.

Acer declined to give sales figures for its Windows 8 products so far, and executives said last month that they were uncertain how Windows 8 would be received by consumers. Acer's 15.6-inch Aspire V5 is the top-selling Windows 8 touchscreen laptop on Amazon's website, with the Vivobook close behind. However, neither of them — nor any other touchscreen laptop breaks into the 20 best selling laptops on Amazon.com.

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company is taking a "modest" approach to increasing distribution of its own-branded Windows 8 Surface tablet.

Analysts say that because of the high price of touch-controlled notebooks, the vast majority of Windows 8 notebooks sold this year will not have a touchscreen. The new operating system, with its large clickable tiles, is optimized for use with a touchscreen.

Daiwa analyst Christine Wang says one problem remains the high price of the touchscreens used for Windows 8 notebooks, which are difficult to make because of their large size and the thinness of the glass. She says demand for Windows 8 is gradually picking up, and should ramp up as the price of the components come down to more mainstream levels.