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Despite a shrinking PC market, HP has unveiled a set of premium devices to push its brand in South Africa.
The company announced on Wednesday a premium range of notebooks, desktops and displays as the company looks to cement market share in SA and take on premium brands like Apple.
The heavily-named HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3 tablet convertible weighs in at just 1.25kg and is 15.8mm thin. HP says the device boasts an eight hour battery life and an "active pen with proximity alert for business PCs to notify a user when the pen is left behind".
The HP Elite x2 1013 G3 features a privacy screen and HP says the detachable notebook has a 13 inch (33cm) display fitted to a 12 inch chassis.
In terms of power laptops, the HP EliteBook 1050 G1 features a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics and up to 4TB (terabytes) of SSD storage.
PC market declines
HP says the business machine has a specific security to prevent unauthorised use of the camera and boasts 16 hours of battery life.
Top of the laptop range is the HP ENVY 17 Laptop with an eighth generation Intel quad-core processors12, discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 graphics. There is an optional 17-inch diagonal 4K display.
According to industry tracker Gartner, the PC market is under pressure with a 2.8% decline in 2017 and a further 1.8% decline in the first quarter of 2018.
"The major contributor to the decline came from China, where unit shipments declined 5.7% year over year," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.
Despite that, HP remains the top PC vendor with 20.8% market share, marginally ahead of Lenovo (20%) and Dell (16%).
The higher cost of PCs is attributable to the shortage of components as companies exercise caution is a soft market.
"With fewer people buying new machines, manufacturers need to get the highest profit margin from each sale. To do that, they are raising the selling points and focusing on customer experience or perception of value," said Kitagawa.
The new HP machines are not cheap and retail at prices generally comparable to premium products from Apple (No. 4 global vendor at 6.9% market share).
Expect availability in SA from July 2018 and pricing will start at R16 999 for the HP ENVY 13 and top out at R34 999 for the 34-inch curved HP ENVY AiO 27.
Here are more details of the devices and pricing:
Device | Price |
HP ENVY 13 Laptop | R16 999 |
HP ENVY x360 13 | R14 999 |
HP ENVY x360 15 | R16 999 |
HP ENVY 17 Laptop | R19 999 |
HP ENVY AiO 27 | R29 999 |
HP ENVY AiO 27 (34 inch) | R34 999 |
