White books ahoy!

A PC that you assemble yourself is called a white box. A laptop that you assemble yourself? It's a white book. Not too many people know this, but white books have been here for some time now, and they give laptop buyers the power to choose the specifications of their desired laptops. Want a 12.5" screen? What about at 15" one? With or without WiFi? How much hard drive space do you need? Unfortunately, a bit of education is still required before buyers feel empowered enough to choose their own specs. This is because we have come to associate laptops with preassembled packages that already come ready to run. And dealers know this, which is why they have decided to just put together their white boxes themselves, under private label brands, and serve these ready-made to the market. Thus you have the Neo and the Viper brands, for instance, and these are sold as completely built-up units. Even if, at heart, these actually have white book platforms. But an even greater barrier to the emergence of a true white book market is the lack of standardized parts. Laptop makers have their own proprietary designs, so you can't, say, fit the LCD display of white book brand #1 to the slot of brand #2. Not for long, hopefully. Under its Common Building Blocks program, Intel has been at the forefront of a campaign to standardize sizes and ports for principal laptop components, such as keyboards, power supplies, display panels and optical drives. If successful, this can even help develop the third-party market as well, leading to companies that specialize in, say, laptop displays alone. Result? Even lower prices for the consumer, as well as the assurance that if ever a component breaks down, it will now be easier to just buy off-the-shelf replacement parts. And hopefully, sometime in the near future, laptop owners can mix and match components just as easily as desktop owners do theirs. It might still be a while before we get there. But in the meantime, an interim step that is emerging is that white book manufacturers are now expanding the variety of plug-in options for their respective products.