An April 1st has a stunning statistic: Apple had a 21.5 percent profit margin in its last fiscal year, while Acer's was a measly 2.3 percent.

This shows that Acer, like its Windows PC counterparts, is competing mostly on price in the consumer laptop arena. (It also suggests that folks who pay $2,500 for a top-of-the-line, 17-inch are getting seriously fleeced, but that's a story for another time.)

What can Acer do to distinguish itself? Being less boring would be a good start. I own an Acer laptop. It's a reasonably fast Windows 7 model with 4 gigs of memory, a 2.1GHz AMD processor, and a 320GB hard drive. I bought it on Amazon for $580--a great price.

My Acer laptop works just fine. That said, it's a generic piece of hardware that fails to stand out in a crowded market. Cover up the corporate logo with a piece of masking tape, and there's little to distinguish most Acer portables from similarly-priced Dell or HP machines.

Acer's decision to focus on netbooks--another generic, low-margin category--when consumers were snapping up iPads certainly hasn't helped the bottom line, either.