This article mentions nothing about the whisper campaign that essentially touted them as not being Windows compatible, so ones with regular harddrives came out,

This article mentions nothing about the whisper campaign that essentially touted them as not being Windows compatible, so ones with regular harddrives came out, and the price became the same as a regular notebook. I remember going to Microcenter to pick up an EEE and they pretty much, even though I specifically asked for it, prevented me from buying one. They did the following: 1. Said "Oh you don't want that, it doesn't run Windows" (I said that's fine, I run linux) 2. Then they said "well, we don't know the price, but we think it is $699" ...... it should've been like $300 or so. 3. Then they said they didn't have any, and wouldn't sell me the display model. The margins may well have been able to improve with scale, but I'm fairly convinced that a subtle market manipulation was perpetrated by someone somewhere because truly affordable technology pops the bubble.