Acer prepares to initiate price war with HP

As HP seeks to reinforce their top spot for global PC shipments, the company is planning to cut prices all around, especially in the very low-cost laptop arena. Acer isn't far behind them, and is prepared to initiate a price war with HP over the coming year.

Read the whole story (http://www.techspot.com/news/36790-acer-prepares-to-initiate-price-war-with-hp.html)

this is nice for me since my wife need a notebook for school next year :)

price war FTW... well actually a win for the consumer regardless of if you prefer HP, Acer or some other brand.

WOOOO price wars, consumer always wins :)

I have been a big supporter of Acer for sometime now. I have 4 PC's in my house and each have an Acer monitor (mine is a 24", the wife 21" and I have 2x19" as well). I have always found the Acer product to be excellent and when I have compared it against the competition it is always considerably cheaper.

Given the fact that I am in the market for a notebook and a projector this pricewar with HP is nothing but good news for me. Acer may not compete in as many sectors as HP does, they do an excellent job at providing a compelling price to performance ratio.

GO ACER!!!

Price wars are good for us consumers until quality and support are reduced to be non-existant. Some notebooks are so poorly constructed that they can't even be expected to last 3 years. And warranties which sometimes used to be 3 years are now 1 year. When they reduce the warranty to 90 days and reduce the netbook prices to $150, you will then have a throw-away item that is expected to fail (when you least expect it and while containing your data). Personally, I would rather pay 50% more for a quality notebook and not have to worry about having the cheapest PC that I could get.

Most everyone I know couldn't even say Acer a couple of years ago, they were like what the heck is an Acer? They were good with the HP name thing. The way I heard of Acer was people were buying them at Aldi grocery stores,and for awhile they were the only laptop you could get without Vista on it. I agree with the only thing really bad that could comes out of this price war is maybe some really low end models. At least I know a good deal when I see one. Let’s hope I do... Acer or HP, let's get it on. I am guessing Acer will win. They don't put crapware on their computers.Who do think will win?

elroacho72 said:
Who do think will win?
I hope they both win. That is, I hope this takes sales away from Dell. I've had three Dell desktops (all used) and two Dell laptops (both new). Dell support has been almost non-existent (I have a horror story to tell about buying a $15 replacement keyboard for one of the laptops. The price was right, but getting Dell to tell me that price was hell). Acer and HP can't possibly be worse.

I think Hp is going to win anyway. In this day and age, name wins over price. People know the HP name, and there computers just look all cool with there fancy designs by some artist you never heard of. If acer really wants to win, give discounts to college students, and professors, thats were the market is.

The joy of capitalism and a consumers market... go Acer.

i agree with the comments on discounts for educational use, but a serious question is who offers a military discount on these? i rarely see acer brands for sale in the military exchange on my current base or any base i've been stationed at but military professionals are buying laptops and netbooks at a rapid rate also and price is usually a big consideration

This should be interesting ;)... hehe

Price war is always good :D. Hopefully this doesn't reflect on the quality of the products as they try to push prices down.

elroacho72 said:
I am guessing Acer will win. They don't put crapware on their computers.Who do think will win?

Are you kidding? I install Acer laptops all day.....and also otherbrands....Acer is the worst of the worst. Injstalling a new acer computer, anykind... tkaes about 2 - 3 hours. THey are famous for the crapware they install...taking forever to do...and no one wants it.

....an HP takes not even an hour. On their machines you for instance get a choice if you want to instal MacAfee or not .... on acer you can tell them no ... they install it anyway.

...Acer is cheap crap that if it works its great..but usuallly they have put to much crap in the same case it will start to fail within months...and they welcome to hell....because you have to deal with Acer custumer service. ..

An example. You need recovery disks.. you cll Acer, they say they dont have any...try to call support...support say they dont have any...you call they guy in charge (since we area reseller) ..in 1 -2 weeks maybe they can send you a CD/DVD that their tech guy burned...and it might even be to the correct model. and if you are angry enough they might not charge you $30 - $40 for the "home burned" media.

...same thing with HP.... they ask for the serial number...confirm the OS you wanted...
confirm your adress... they send you an original set free of charge. All done within 5 min.
...usually you get it within a week ... longest wait i had wast 3 weeks....but that was for a computer that was 8 years old. .... to a while to find the disks .. but they send me original disks ... free of chage .. no problem. And they was honest to start with that it might take 3 weeks since the machine was old.

...HP doesnt have to fight Acer with price ... they can just stick to custumer service and great quality .... then Acer can give the computers away ...they will still suck.

...Acer have turned out some good machines... and sometimes you can get a lot for a small amount of money....but when it goes wrong...(like it usually does...) ... .welcome to hell...
and when it goes wriong its goes really wrong........remember the Predator?
..or the latest laptops "catching on fire" ...... is a case of Acer putting all the crap they can....then it fails .....same thing with a lot of the Acer Ferrari computers...they still haunt people today...major heating issues...leading to component failures .. one by one.... first one USB port after a a few weeks. . .then the next ... then the firewire port .. .then the next USB .... and then the keyboard.....Ferrari .. my ***.

delt with Acer for over 4 years now....thewre is always some issue with them. .... but i'll give them the Acer One...seems to be a good product... (for now)

RickD said:
The price was right, but getting Dell to tell me that price was hell). Acer and HP can't possibly be worse.

....no not HP .. but trust me .. Acer support can be much worse.

I used to hate Dell. ....but they have improved a lot

Acer is instead on the top of my hate list. . .

. it comes for years of daily experience from most brands. .... consumers only see the price .. sure Acer sells a lot of computers.... and since a lot of consumers never heard of the brand they have no bad assosiations with the brand either.. ...but they will..

That's good news for everyone because it's obvious that hp will follow with new price cuts too. In any case it's a victory for the consumer!

Bring on the price wars! Even if it doesn't work out for the mfgs, it's a win for consumers because it's difficult to raise prices again once a new price point has been established. There's no going back.

I guess I hit nerve with JudaZ...but there's nothing you can tell me that will change my mind that HP is the KING of crapware. One of the main reasons I became a tech was so that I would not have to deal with companies, and their horrible customer service. I think we all can agree that customer service in the US is nonexistant, literally, since it's all been outsourced to elsewhere.
And, it's been a long time since I had to deal with restore disks...I usually just throw them out because all they do is reload the crapware BACK on your PC.
Thx.

With a statement like this "especially in the very low-cost laptop arena"
I can only assume we will see the difference in a laptop and a nettop dwindle some more.

Price wars are always good... I'm sure we'll see some great deals for consumers especially in the next month or two coming into the holiday season.

I've been faithful to HP over the course of my last two PC's. Only problem being a faulty harddrive which I luckily backed up prior to it dying. I have been doing a lot of researching lately as I'm in the market for a notebook and find that Acer is up there in terms of positive reviews... I almost pulled the trigger on an Acer recently but held back to hoping for some more competitive deals. Hopefully there coming.

RickD said:
Acer and HP can't possibly be worse.
You have NO idea, do you? :-)

At the very least, they are all equally bad. The only decent tech support from any computer manufacturer for general consumers is Apple... Heh.

gotta hand it to acer , I picked up one of there laptops for 300 euro , its only 1 ram , but fine for my need , but if I had a thousand euro I would have got a mac , there ment to be light years ahead !

Both HP and Acer make great products. HP, however force feeds a lot of junk software and more than that the software shares usage info back to HP. Some of the software is geared towards getting you buy something. This results tying up your system resources and constant annoyance for the user. For the past several years I have been able to redirect many friends to other brands such as Acer who do not practice this in thieir products.
I consider this equally important to price for users in the know!

Oh man, do I ever have some complaints with HP software... A good example is the msconfig problem where some printer software will disable your ability (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=6x2&q=msconfig+hp+access+denied&aq=f&oq=&aqi=) to change programs listed in the msconfig utility under the startup tab. LOL.

"Great products" might be an overstatement too. Their laptop design has gotten much nicer to look at, but internally, they've had lots of problems including GPUs practically melting out of their sockets (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01087277&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1842189&lang=en) and some serious problems with hinges in their displays (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=c01611512&jumpid=ex_r2910_performics%2Fk1971%2FPrimary&ampdfmt=fy08).

diego713 said:
Both HP and Acer make great products. HP, however force feeds a lot of junk software and more than that the software shares usage info back to HP. Some of the software is geared towards getting you buy something. This results tying up your system resources and constant annoyance for the user. For the past several years I have been able to redirect many friends to other brands such as Acer who do not practice this in thieir products.
I consider this equally important to price for users in the know!

Must be really diffrent in Europe compared to the US then.

Installed a new Acer last week... i counted at least 15 crapware applications on that one.

also installed som HP machines. they usually have MS Office 2007 Trial, then McAfee .... but you get asked if you want is during install....and if you say no..its gone.
...then a PDF application that is purly crap...i'll give you that.. ..but thats 1 application that is usless. 1 that you might want in Office .. and some AV you might want .... ... 3 apps ... compareds to atleast 15 in an Acers.

But this in North Europe ... maybe its completely diffrent in the US

...all i can say is that here HP support is brilliant .. and they include almost no crap....

Acer sold Vista machines (laptops ) with 512MB RAM!!! ..1GB is to little...512MB is insane.
They are loaded with crap so it takes 2 -3 hours to install brand new machine... ..their support is non existent ...and the quality of the machines are mostly so so ...

but like i said .. it could be that its just like this here. ... for me HP is king no matter what they cost. (if you stay away from cheap Radio/tv store modells made specially for that market.... cuz they are crap ´from all brands)

yes, let's say the price is kind of lower than before, but how about the quality then? according to the news article, the lower price acer has cheap hardware, does this mean that the quality of the new low price acer now is not even the same as before? i personally don't like acer for the one we have back home usually got misfunctioned and always needs reformatting. and now they are compromising the quality of their product just to reach they goal to sell 40 millions of netbooks next year?

buyers now a days thinks of the quality first than the price. i don't know for some but for me, i stand on the importance of quality especially the duarability of the product...

instead having a price war, why can't they just have "quality war" or "new features war"... it will be a lot better perhaps..

instead having a price war, why can't they just have "quality war" or "new features war"... it will be a lot better perhaps..

In a society where money fuels everything, price becomes the most important factor. Quality is important to those who have the money to consider it, but the least common denominator is price and that is what what drive sales, especially at the moment.

Hopefully they won't sacrifice quality in this case, but the quality of most budget laptops isn't very good to start with. I don't think they could trim much off before they just 'fall apart'. :)

The joy of capitalism and a consumers market... go Acer.

This is a good deal for all consumers. But Acer must also make good quality laptops for consumers to buy their product.
Previously Dell is the number 1 seller on laptops. Now HP has taken over and Acer is catching up. This will be a battle of quality and pricing, also include the features of the laptop that will sold to consumers.

all acer,HP,DELLS and all got a little junk software and poor support ,pooriy make. is yes to all.So if you got to get a netbook or laptop u got to live with it.

Yeaaaaaa!!!!!
Been trying to decide between upgrading desktop ( MB, CPU and Mem ) or a new laptop. Guess I'll put off the decision for awhile.

Acer was always cheaper than HP when you consider the tech specs of their products, but that doesn't mean that they provide the same quality.
For example all the Acer notebooks that I had the chance to test had cheap casing and really really crappy keyboard. When compared to their HP counterparts the slight price difference suddenly seems insignificant.

I hope we (The consumers) benefit from good quality hardware and free DOS (Also Linux might get a huge lift here since it will definitely lower computer without windows expensive licenses).

Talking to friends I don't consider netbooks as disposable as others would sugest, so quality casing and hardware are not in discuss here, hope they don't discuss it either.

Price waaarrr !! let us, consumers, pick up the peaces :p

I bought a laptop about 3 months ago. I did a lot of shopping around and chose an Acer. At the time HP could not compete with Acer on price. I ended up buying the Aspire 5739 for around $650. It's good to see competition.

I used to setup computers all day long for my work and honestly I thought more times than not hp computers were unbelievibly slow for the hardware that was in them. I honestly thought the computers that on average ran fastest out of the box were gateways. Any computer you get that isn't custom built will have its fair share of crapware though. Just go into the purchase looking at hardware vs price and expect to reformat when you get it..or clean up very well. But that's just my opinion.

In point of view only reducing price on notebook/netbook won't increase much chance to compete with HP. HP is world's no 1 company in desktop/laptop selling. Acer has to adopt very aggressive marketing, open their customer center in different country, give some free give away to spread news about new ACER desktop/ laptop /netbook. I believe in this world only marketing from tv, internet only doesn't work. You have to reach to public too from mouth to mouth advertising. I also believe lot of revenue for HP comes from corporate world too. So Acer has to look for that option too. They should give some good deals for leasing the desktop / laptop to corporate world. If they gain on corporate world then lot of people will start using ACER desktop/laptop at office location. So they will slowly start getting inclined towards ACER.
This is very long process and i am not saying this is going to happen overnight but in order to get the number one spot in world market under PC selling company, there is lot to prepare and plan and start implementing.

aestarvirus said:
yes, let's say the price is kind of lower than before, but how about the quality then? according to the news article, the lower price acer has cheap hardware, does this mean that the quality of the new low price acer now is not even the same as before? i personally don't like acer for the one we have back home usually got misfunctioned and always needs reformatting. and now they are compromising the quality of their product just to reach they goal to sell 40 millions of netbooks next year?

buyers now a days thinks of the quality first than the price. i don't know for some but for me, i stand on the importance of quality especially the duarability of the product...

instead having a price war, why can't they just have "quality war" or "new features war"... it will be a lot better perhaps..

Nowdays there aren't many laptop makers that can afford to sell sub-par products, if there are any.
I don't think Acer or any other major manufacturers would settle for quick selling large quantities of crap products, because after all when the word spreads out (if the products are bad) it would hurt their company significantly, long term profit = 0.
It is misfortunate that you had problems with your laptop, but basically price war between them is a good thing for the consumer, just look at Ati & Nvidia.

HP is a giant.And their products are great.So it won't be easy for Acer to defeat HP in the marketing sector.

Now I'm really looking forward to black friday.