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Intel promises touchscreen laptop prices will drop to just $200

Intel promises touchscreen laptop prices will drop to just $200

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Intel Clover Trail Atom Z2760 tablet
Intel Clover Trail Atom Z2760 tablet

Intel, AMD, and ARM are all competing to offer a compelling Windows 8 experience at a low price point, but Intel might be poised to shoot ahead. For the time being, you have to pay upwards of $400 for a tablet with Intel's dual-core "Clover Trail" Atom processor, but company CEO Paul Otellini says that prices will drop drastically when the new Bay Trail chip arrives later this year. Not only will Bay Trail allegedly offer a quad-core chip without consuming additional power, but Otellini claims that "prices are going to be down to as low as $200" for Windows 8 touchscreen laptops, according to a CNET report.

"The touch price points today are still fairly high and they're coming down very rapidly over the next couple of quarters," Otellini said today, on a quarterly investor call.

At $200, Windows 8 touchscreen devices would be as cheap as even the cheapest popular Chrome OS device today, the Acer C7 Chromebook. Whether those laptops have the performance and battery life to offer a compelling Windows 8 experience, though, that's harder to call.

Update: According to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the conference call, Otellini actually said that touchscreen laptops with "non-Core" processors will be the ones to hit $200, without specifying Bay Trail. That could mean that the company's cheaper Pentium chips will be the ones to address that price point, as they do in the $200 Acer C7.