Interestingly, though, Orlando’s post suggests the the difference might actually be $150. I don’t know.

Also, every that pointed out the USB flash drives are quite different from SSDs is, of course, correct. I am, and was, aware of the difference, however I choose to use flash drives due to their availability.

I can even vaguely remember someone from Asus saying at a press release that they paid for the extra storage with the saving on the Windows license.

The idea of making such a PR goof in a small market seems very strange to me.

The first thing that most of us are going to think is that Microsoft is involved. But Asus are not going to be selling that many Eees in Oz, so it isn’t really worth the expense and possible PR fallout for such a small market. It would be if the difference was in all markets, but not just one.

The second option is that Asus is stabbing Linux in the back. But business doesn’t work like that. As far as Asus is concerned, you can put CPM on the thing if you want, so long as they get your money. And a cheaper computer sells better than an expensive one. Asus care about you buying their products, not about what you do with them afterwards. And as Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and others have shown, Microsoft isn’t stopping companies putting Linux on their products and selling well. They might have done so at one time, but not any more.

The third player as I see it is the distributer. The most likely culprit to my way of thinking.
If Asus go through a third party who buys Asus stock, and sells it on to the wholesale customers in that region, then they could be the ones gaining from this. It’s the only option that makes any sense to me. They get the extra $50 or whatever portion of that is the wholesale price, they may get to set a base level wholesale price with the option to sell for more if they choose, so they would be the only ones I could see gaining from this situation.

Where do you see aud$150?

I do disagree with the marketing of Linux at a higher price than Windows though. I think an exact model should be marketed with Linux and Windows, and the price of the Linux model should be cheaper. The way this is marketed, it definitely shows Microsoft’s influence and ability to play games with companies like ASUS.

Take a look at newegg

Pricing difference between 8 and 16GB is close to $40 - $100 USD. The price between 16GB and 32GB is $80 - $200 USD (Depending on whether or not you look at the same manuf, or the two cheapest)

So it seems that the while the $150 market isn’t unreasonable. But at the same time it kind of is b/c you have to include the license for XP. At which time one could argue, that Asus is charging a license for the linux distro. So that is a mute point.

What people need to be complaining about is why can’t we purchase a 12GB version with linux on it at the same price as $500 …

Paying a mark up for a larger hard drive is fine, but if you want to compare the distro’s at that point you can’t. What fustrates me, is they will look back in 6 months and so look, Asus Eee PC’s sell better with XP. Which isn’t true, they sell better at the $500 price point , not the $650.

No doubt, that a similar deal has been penned in this case.

http://www.asusnotebook.com.au/eee-pc.php

* ASUS eee PC 900 Black Notebook Intel CeleronM 900MHz with Win XP Home: $799.00 inc GST

* ASUS eee PC 900 Black Notebook Intel CeleronM 900MHz with Linux: $649.00 inc GST

With idem configurations the Linux eee PC is ~U$S150 cheaper

Is this possible?