This 15.6 inch notebook offers a little more muscle for your money, says Fujitsu, with the $1,199 LifeBook AH530 packing a Core i5 processor and 500GB hard drive.
It doesn’t seem like long ago that the first $1,000 notebook brought forth howls of protest throughout laptop land.
Well, those were howls of protest from the notebook manufacturers who
didn’t have a $1,000 dollar deal claiming that there would now be a race to the bottom, profits and margins were being sacrificed, yadda yadda yadda.
We people who
buy notebooks were howling with delight, of course. And naturally it wasn’t long before every notebook manufacturer was playing at the affordable end of town – and they soon discovered that while margins might be lower, sales will be higher.
Fast forward to today, and what you can get for around the $1,000 mark is truly astounding. It’s also proof why notebooks are far outselling desktops.
Case in point: Fujitsu’s LifeBook AH530, which hits town this week at a low $1,199.
Its 15.6 inch screen puts it in the most popular segment of the market, with GfK reporting that mid-size notebooks account for two-thirds of laptops sold in Australian.
As a result there’s no compromising on a squint-vision screen, and like an increasing number of similarly sized notebooks the AH530 also has a dedicated numeric keypad to please the spreadsheet set.
Under the hood sits a 2.4GHz Core i5-450M processor, which is Intel’s mobile all-rounder. The integrated Intel HD graphics is sufficient for everyday work and play – but if you want high-end multimedia and heavy-duty gaming, this isn’t the notebook for you.
The 2GB of RAM is good enough to get you off the starting blocks and we doubt you’d outgrow the 500GB hard drive in a hurry.
The AH530 comes with Windows 7 Professional, and Fujitsu rates the six-cell battery as being good for around four hours between drinks.
For more information and the latest pricing, click through to the
Fujitsu AH530 page on Notebook Hunter.