The maker of expensive printer ink, HP has worked out the way to defeat Apple is to do the same thing cheaper.
The outfit has decided to sink the over-priced, but nice looking, Macbook Air, by offering an ultra thin netbook for half the price.

The HP Pavilion dm1z costs $399 direct from HP after entering a coupon code. It has an 11.6-inch screen, though it weighs 3.5 pounds. While it is not as thin as the Air at only 0.8 inches it does have some things that are pretty good. These include a 320GB hard disk drive (7200RPM), 3GB of memory, more ports, and the option for built-in 3G from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint.

The dm1z is not constructed from aluminium like the Air and really does not look as nice. It does run AMDs dual-core E-350 processor (1.6GHz, 1MB L2 Cache with AMD Radeon HD 6310M graphics) which have their own GPU. This makes them much better than anything from Intel but not as good as the MacBook Air's Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an Nvidia chipset. The $999 MacBook Air has a 64GB solid-state drive and 2GB of memory.

Battery life between the two seems comparable. Of course, that depends on what you're doing with the devices, but both exceed five hours, according to most reviews. But hell, it is $600 cheaper and does pretty much the same sort of thing.

Now if the same people work out that this is the way to sink the Apple tablet then everyone will be happy.