Personally I have seen a gap in the market for good affordable slim laptop/ultrabooks for students. All the 13inch laptops with half decent specs in the UK are around £550+ (when i mention laptops i mean really slim ones with out a Disk Drive and with a standerd HDD) These are incredibly, in my opinion over priced. After some research found that they probably only cost around £230 on a mass production basis. There is a gap for a 13inch slim laptop with 8gb RAM a i5-5200U CPU and 128GB SSD for students in either college or university, or for business people as well. With the SSD it would be solderd along with the ram onto the mobo, abit like the Macbook airs/pros this would take down production costs and would mean that the laptops slimmer. There are some laptops out there for around £400 with these kinds of specs, but the only ones i could find were 15inch's (not the perfect size of 13" for college work) these laptops were chunky and heavy as they had HDD and disk drives, if these were eliminated and turned into battery space and SSD drive slot this would make the perfect laptop.
At this point in time no brand or company has specifically marketed a laptop towards "students" There are laptops that are good for students but the main marketing campaign isnt towards students, and students make up alot of the laptop market. Also the laptops that are good for students such as the Macbook pro/air line up and the lenovo laptops are really expensive. The perfect student spec laptop should be - i5 CPU, 8GB RAM for google chrome tabs for doing research, an SSD for speed , light weight ,no moving parts and durability, also a 1080p screen and massive fuck off battery, and USB type C with other ports, good wifi, and USB tpye 3. There is no need for a Disk drive, or a HDD, also there is no need for an Ethernet port either, most laptops are on the go if you are a student.
So I thought there should be a company that designs and makes laptops that are specifically aimed towards students looking for a cheap laptop but still of good spec and quality. I think the sweat spot is around £400
I've done a little research and this is the spec list i would want and how much it would roughly cost to build : CPU and MOBO - £150 i5-5200U ish RAM - £20 SSD-£20 PSU-15 Screen-15 battery-5 Total including labour and other random shit = £252.50 if sold for £400 I would make = £147.5 from each laptop
(These prices are taking into account mass production costs and wholesale prices ish) OKAY THIS WAS ONLY A THOUGHT AND I REALLY WANT PEOPLE TO CRITICISE WHAT I HAVE PUT SO IT PUTS ME BACK ON EARTH BECAUSE I KNOW THIS IS A Ludicrous IDEA
I thought i could get my funding from Kick starter So yeah please ridicule my crazy idea/plan point out all the flaws and if you do, do this, please also help and leave constructive criticism and any further ideas on how to make my idea better. Would appreciate any help, im 16 and just thinking out loud. Jonathan :D
I do not think that their is a screen out their that is the size to suffice as a laptop at a price point of 15 pound. Same for the battery. The battery internals are comprised off about 6 or 8 18650 batteries, their is no way you can get them for 5 pound. Well I guess you can but they would be cheap knock off batteries and would fail. Like how those hover boards did and do. Some manufacturers are going to li-po batteries which are packs, but they are more expansive, but then you can get the thinness factor for portability. SSD is on the low end to, you did not specify space but I do not think you can get an SSD for anything bigger then 16GB for 20 pound. And having an OS run off of a cheap ssd and having the ssd and the only form of storage may slow the system down. Having an SSD for OS and HDD for storage would make more sense.
Plus you have to figure in insurance cost, if you are to have a unit catch fire you need to have the insurance and legal team to help you out.
EDIT: you did specify storage space my bad.
The reason for not being able to get a 128GB SSD for 20 pound is you have to get the NAND chips, the NAND controller, and the cost of manufacturing and shipping. If a NAND controller can support only 4 chips with a max storage space of 16GB, you would have 64GB so to get to 128 you need to put in another controller with 4 more 16gb chips. If a NAND controller is 6 pound and the chips are 10 pound and the shipping is 1 pound per SSD and the manufacturing cost is 3 pound per SSD you would be looking at you would have a 20 plus pound SSD
Thanks for the reply, also youve got to remember if this would be done it would be produced in China yes i have to agree the battery and screen would probably be alot more, but by judging off other laptop prices they could be around this price. Also as its in china, could probably get these things straight from the manufactures or something???
Realistically you could go to a chinese manufacturer that sells a rip off macbook air have their design team change up the design so you do not get sued have them add in the bits and bobs you want and probably have it come down to around 300 pound. Check out alibaba.com its a site that has chinese manufacturers and check out their products. Some manufacturers are not that honest when revealing the prices, you have to ask them.
Also when getting this made, have the manufacturer not include an OS, most are pirated versions of Windows. Thats how the prices are so cheap, they do not pay for the OS.
That basically does look like a macbook air. Be sure to have fun with paint colors, a lot of manufacturers just sell the plain boring black laptops, you would be unique having different colors.
That all sounds a little too inexpensive. Do you mind citing your sources on the pricing? You also have to keep in mind that manufacturers probably do sell their laptops for 400 a piece to their resellers (Best Buy, Staples, or whatever is in the UK). A lot of the time, it's up to the reseller to determine the selling price to the customer. That's why you're seeing the 550 price range. Additionally, you need to think about licensing for an OS. Manufacturers pay HUGE money to get Windows on their machines when they're being made. That is most likely an upfront cost as well, determined on the volume of machines created. We're talking many thousands of dollars US, so what that would come down to in the UK, I have no idea. This is where ideas start from, my friend. I don't know the economy of your country right now or how the tech market is, but with a little dedication, things like this work. Good on you for having ambition at such a young age when many others do not.
I would love to buy a barebones macbook with no ram and no HDD so that I could put my own in there. Even if they sold them like that they are still way overpriced. You should also try and make a mag-safe type of charging cable. This would help your marketing toward students. I would be okay with the thickness that you get from m.2 SSDs, Also don't be shy to make the whole thing a little thicker in order to get a lot more battery life out of it. There is a real slack in the market of barebones.
The tray price for a 5200u is $281 and the motherboard is not going to be cheap either. You'd also need to find someone selling 5200u's by them selves or with new motherboards, and you won't because laptop motherboards are not standardized in any way. Laptop's do not have a size chart like desktops have ATX, Micro-Atx, EATX, ITX, etx; So the laptop casing has to be made with the specific motherboard in mind, and the cooling is much more difficult. Most every laptop cooler is different from every other in some way. Whether thats how its mounted, orientation, heat dissipation, copper used, fan used, heat, width, length, and probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head. So at that point in time you need a case that is designed to perfectly fit your screen, your motherboard, and your cooler. Usually this all has to be custom made, and thats why the price can be so high in comparison to the parts cost.
Frankly this is a project for a larger operation that a kick-starter start up. You'd really want to be doing at least one or two pieces of the puzzle custom, and thats expensive. There is a reason that $400 laptops are celeron machines that lack any serious hardware...
Thanks, and just google the parts and take off some of the price as if this were to happen you would buy in bulk which normally brings prices down. and OS might be something the User will have to do, just to keep the price down. As users could decide whether to pirate the OS or buy new :) and it would effect me. Ill probably be basing my business model off of One Plus with minor modifications, such as no invite system. But more research is deffo needed haha
Thanks for the reply, $281 is £196.61 Then take some money off due to bulk buying and wholesale prices and you have around £150 as i said all these prices are "ish" could be more like £170, and Ill have to contact some manufactures in china but it is deffo possible to build one for around £250 for this spec range but this could only happen on mass production. I would say the Mobo and CPU bundle would be around £170 then on second thoughts. But looking at other laptops on the market, this is completely possible. The Kick Starter fund would go towards a team of engineers to work on how to fit all the crap inside it and i would exchange information until we came to a conclusion that would be possible to work with.
No this just isn't realistic. Bulk prices are not nearly as much as you expect for the kinds of quantity you'd be talking about. The cpu might be 185 BP and the Mobo is going to be 50-80.
