Over at IT World (via Slashdot) comes the news that Dell has stopped selling its Windows RT tablet without a keyboard (which had been priced at $299) and now only sells a Win RT tablet with a keyboard at $479:
Dell made several changes to the RT offers on its website. By Friday evening it had eliminated all the options for a standalone tablet and now only sells the product, called the XPS 10, bundled with a keyboard.
In some ways it bucks a recent trend. Dell has been lowering prices for its Windows RT tablet since May, after the company admitted it was selling poorly. When it was introduced last October, the XPS 10 was priced at $499, and it had dropped to $299 in May.
Dell is apparently trying to up-sell customers to breathe a bit of life into its XPS 10 business after poor sales, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates
Selling the tablet bundled with a keyboard suggests Dell views it as a device for creating content rather than just consuming it, perhaps because Windows RT is designed to provide some “laptop-like” capabilities, Kay said.
I predict Dell will be out of the RT business entirely sometime early in 2014 (using Christmas and post-Christmas sales to deplete its inventory as much as possible). ..bruce w..