So has Asus finally completely lost it?

Hmm… An Asus Eee PC… Or a C2D Macbook.

Tough choice.

/Sarcasm

(Pick the macbook, fools).

The Asus giveth, and the Asus taketh away.

Here's a great example where the engineers are running amok and the marketers need to reign them in. "What is our product niche, guys? What do we want the EEE brand to represent/ Who is the competition? What's the business case?"

I guess if ASUS wants EEE to be a full-scale alternative brand, perhaps more consumer-friendly than "ASUS" and a bit like HP seems to be using Compaq, I can sort of see how they can justify doing this. Then our negative reaction is based on our erroneous/limited preconceived notion of what an "EEE" PC is supposed to be. But it's not clear to me that a full-blown alternative brand is either necessary or desirable: establishing a brand is expensive, and consumer electronics is full of "foreign" or "strange" company names that consumers eventually got comfortable with.

I think it's great if Asus wants to expand the Eee branding line in to additional notebook clasees and pricing tiers but this is just silly and will probably fail.

Are Asus just exploiting the Eee logo now?

We already have $900 dollar notebooks with 13.3" screens that perform a heck of a lot better than the Eee's.

Where is the market for this? The only way is if the 10.1" and weight are even slightly small and light respectively. Else no one will buy these.

I don't see why Asus should restrict themselves with the Eee PC brand. Simply by offering these higher end models they are giving the consumer a better and wider choice which can only be a positive. In order to save money on their part they only have to limit the quantity of high end Eee PC's produced.

This is getting ridiculous. Dell 13" laptop often cost less than $1000 when they are on sale. MacBook is like $1200. Even the X61 is only around $1000 and all of them are miles ahead in performance. The price is now into 12"/13" laptop category, and the weight/size advantage for 10" vs 12" is much smaller than 10" vs 15".

For $1000 you can get a Thinkpad X61 that only weight 2.5 pounds, with performance and build quality miles ahead of EEE.

I can build a complete gaming machine (without a monitor) from 900 dollars, and it would probably even kick ass for that amount. Granted, that's not portable. But even then, I'd rather get a laptop that performs and has some storage room as opposed to frugal Eee packages.