Wintel tablets rumored to be pricey

With the plethora of Android tablets available on the market available for less than price of Apple’s iPad 2, you would think that Windows 8 tablets would have to cost about the same to stand a chance against them. Well, if rumors turn out to be true, Intel and Microsoft don’t seem to think so. According to DigiTimes’ sources, Intel and Microsoft (who have dominated the consumer market for years with their Intel PC + Windows combination aka Wintel) are unwilling to lower the prices of their hardware and software. Apparently this means we’ll be seeing Wintel tablets priced from $599 to $899 – ouch.

If the companies do drop the prices of their products it could help the Wintel-based tablet market share, however it would also damage pricing in the PC market and would bring down their gross margin performance. Notebook vendors are already reported to be picking up ARM processors for Windows 8 devices if Intel doesn’t lower the prices of its Clover Trail-W platform. It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how this story unfolds. Stay tuned.