It appears that the 1201N may already be discontinued.  A quick search of several top online stores including Amazon.com, Buy.com, B&H Photo, Newegg, OnSale.com, and Zipzoomfly indicate that the Asus 1201N is not in stock without any indication of it returning to stock.

Other Asus models are still available which leads me to believe one thing.

Asus has decided to discontinue the 1201N so that they can start pushing out the 1201PN to replace it.

This is something I commented on earlier but emails I’ve received in the last few days and comments I’ve read on several forums leads me to believe that Asus isn’t going to wait for Intel to run out of chips to stop selling the units.

From here two things could happen:

1 – A glut of refurbished 1201N’s will hit online stores.  The same happened with the Asus 1101HA.  Once you couldn’t buy it in retail stores or brand new online suddenly refurbished models showed up.  The demand was and is still so high that many retailers are charging more for the 1101HA as a refurb than it cost brand new.  With so many liquidators and resellers sitting on units this will happen in the next 4 to 6 weeks if I’m right.

2 – Asus will put together a provisional batch before officially discontinuing the model.  The worst thing a manufacturer wants are scalpers.  It may cost Asus a little bit more but it will help stem the tide until they can get the 1201PN production up.

Now I could be completely wrong and stores could be flushed with stock in a few days.  I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

I sent an inquiry to Asus asking for clarification.  Once it arrives I’ll be sure to update this blog post.

[Update - This appears to only be impacting the black version of the 1201N.  The silver 1201Ns are still available which makes sense since they were released after the black version.]

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