Australian PC maker challenges the big boys

Australia notebook vendor Venom is challenging the status quo by bringing the third generation of an Australian-designed notebook to market.

Resellers are being invited to sell the Blackbook, targeted at power users and starting at $2799.

The machine was developed directly with the manufacturer and not through a sub-manufacturer or barebones supplier, said Venom's managing director Jaan Elturan.

"We manufacture complete products, we're not a barebones generic product supplier," he said. "A lot of these guys just use a stock cooler. We designed our own cooler."

No doubt the success or failure of Venom might be of interest to some other Australian laptop resellers facing shrinking PC margins - especially given that Elturan's background is in the PC channel, reselling systems from major vendors like HP, Toshiba, Acer and Lenovo.

Having started in the PC business in the late 1990s in his bedroom, Elturan refurbished ex-lease notebooks, going on to establish retailer MLN. During this time he said he learned to turn dented, used laptops into something he could sell.

But while some PC resellers have since diversified by moving into managed data and cloud services, Elturan has gone the other way, stepping away from MLN to establish the Venom hardware brand.

"We didn't have an additional income stream from software or a smartphone division we can offset against our PC division," he said.

In his view, vendors who sell high-performance machines fail by selling them through mass market retailers. The problem, he agued, is that computers are sold like "a refrigerator or toaster".

By contrast, he said Venom resellers must agree to operate as an authorised service centre. The company does not have a distributor and at the time of writing the only Blackbook reseller was MLN.

In a media demonstration session of the Blackbook, Elturan pointed out separate cooling systems, one for the GPU and another for the CPU. He said the machine was approximately 25mm in thickness and weighed 2.5kg, will simultaneously support two 4K panels and runs low latency RAM.

“Sourcing the RAM was an incredible feat on its own,” said Elturan.

While he described PC development costs as "astronomical", he said a way around this was to share certain components with other companies, including in Japan and Germany.

The latest machine will not be the last, if Elturan's plans pan out. On the roadmap is a 17-inch version of the new notebook model.