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You can get a laptop built to your specs with vendors like Pioneer. http://pioneercomputers.com.au/products/categories.asp?c1=3. They used to give you the option of Ubuntu pre-installed, but even now you can avoid the Microsoft tax by not selecting an OS.

To my mind, this is how all laptops should be offered.

or this

For those in Oceania there's Pioneer Computers. They let you build your own system, often with way more options than the likes of Dell give you, and you can choose to have Ubuntu pre-loaded, or even get them to set up multi boot with multiple partitions. You also get to see how much windows costs.

Actually, Android is already shipping on netbooks. Granted they're referred to as smartbooks when they run a smartphone OS, but the device is basically a netbook that runs Android.

Like this little thing being sold by an Australian company: http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/configure.asp?c1=3&c2=12&id=3169

You can buy it with "Andriod" or the appropriately named WinCE.

I have a 7" tablet with the same CPU and version of Android as this device and it is usable - the netbook is tempting in some ways ... a keyboard is useful when doing any input, but an annoyance when (say) reading an eBook.

These comments apply pretty well to my new "ePad" - a 7 inch tablet running Android 1.6: http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&id=3172

It cost AUD$199 and has a pretty crappy protective film over the screen (lots of air bubbles in the top half - managed to clear most of them away - not a show stopper, just not brilliant).

The Wifi packed it in within the first day - it hangs and reboots after a couple of minutes. But it does have ethernet and I don't *need* to use the Wifi anyway.

The app market wouldn't work, but I was able to download apps from other markets, including downloading to PC first when that was more convenient. I could install off a USB drive when I downloaded stuff to my PC. The tablet has a dongle with 2 USB ports and 1 ethernet port. the dongle falls out of the socket easily, but it was manageable.

The tablet works great with reading books and OK with PDFs. Movies are a bit finicky - haven't got it working perfectly yet - need exactly right codecs and resolution, I think, but I have the details - more testing.

Find the touch screen a bit finicky - sometimes doesn't register a touch, sometimes over-registers: so when scrolling, you might get no movement, a click instead of scrolling, scrolling exactly right, or scrolling way beyond what you meant. Similarly when using the onscreen keyboard. Could be better.

For $199 it was still a bargain, even with Android 1.6. Give the market another a year or so, and I can ditch this device and buy something better.

And like the parent said: not for grandma and grandpa, but a great little bargain for a hacker who just wants a new Android toy to play with.

If people don't want a format or technology, nothing the studios or content providers do will get them what they want (our money).

...Then company X spends more on marketing and adds better sweeteners for the retail chains, then company X's product gets touted as the best by "knowledgeable" staff in shops, then the average idiot buys what they believe to be the next big thing. To vote with ones wallet, one needs to be informed and resistant to reality distortion fields, and most people fail both of those tests, even people in I.T.

It's like iPhone here in Oz, or Windows 7*. Reasonably good products, sure, but not the best. They just happen to have the right marketing and retailer compliance behind them to become the standard.

* Actually Windows 7 because you can't buy a new PC/notebook without it unless you buy Apple or go to one small company** without any significant mind share. MS has sewn it up so all other suppliers have to pay for a windows license anyway over here.
**My mention of pioneer is not me spamming /., I attempted to buy from them a couple of years ago and found the service so slow and disorganised I gave up and got a freaking Vista license from someone else - I really hope they have improved.

You mean like this?

Scroll down to "Operating Systems" and choose between Ubuntu (+ AU$0) and Windows XP (+ AU$89) and Vista (+ AU$189) or Vista Ultimate (+ AU$349).

That is how Dell, HP, Lenovo and all the other vendors should be selling OSs. That is how a *free* market works.

>Pioneer do no more than assemble and re-badge some fairly shoddy Taiwanese gear.

>This is in no sense a local product, and in no sense a quality product. I bought one high end laptop from them, it failed due to poor design, and they absolutely failed to deal properly with it - they have no stock of replacement mobos, they have no wholesale arrangements for replacement of failed mobos, they have no means of repairing them.

Gee. Harsh. Considering that the alternative is to buy some fairly shoddy Taiwanese gear from the Taiwanese, and hence to send ALL of the taxpayers money to Taiwan instead of just some of it.

>I wouldn't buy a toaster from those clowns.

http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/government/

Apparently the Australian Government, however, does buy their stuff.

You wouldn't be a competing supplier or importer by any chance, would you? Or worse yet, a Windows-only supplier? Just asking.

> I still sent him (or rather his office) an email asking him if he was considering open source

You weren't alone.

http://www.fsdaily.com/Government/An_Open_Letter_to_the_New_Australian_Prime_Minister_Kevin_Rudd/related_links

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/79966,community-to-gillard-consider-open-source.aspx

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/73376,open-source-the-biggest-potential-game-changer-for-government-senator-lundy.aspx

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/76453,cebit-08-senator-lundy-lobbies-for-open-source-change.aspx

There were many calls from the Australian wider community for Rudd to consider open source.

Now, with the new (and relatively inexpensive) "netbooks" coming on to the market, many of them with Linux pre-installed, this seems more and more like the sensible way for the government to go.

The government could even be very smart here, and source the "Linux netbooks for education" from an Australian supplier:

http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/products.asp?c1=3&c2=12

All of the Pioneer DreamBook Light computers can be purchased with Ubuntu pre-installed as an option. No Windows tax with Australian taxpayers money being paid un-necessarily to an American company. Local product, from a local company.

Seriously, why is it that I can't find a sub-notebook that doesn't charge MS tax for anything beyond the low end model?

Here is a 9" screen sub-notebook with a 60GB hard disk where the MS tax is an additional cost, such that the machine can be ordered with Ubuntu and without the MS tax.

http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/configure.asp?c1=3&c2=12&id=2696

Ask the retailers, "Why do you sell people MS Office for $300 when you could just pre-install OpenOffice for free?"

Answer: there is no profit in "free", and the users will probably just pirate MS Office anyway because (a) they can, and (b) that is what they are used to.

Clever users refuse to pay for MS Office and install the free OpenOffice themselves. Even cleverer ones find a computer with *free* Ubuntu pre-installed, and save on MS Windows (prices in that link are in AUD, not USD).

Last May, a new PC with a just-released Radeon 2900 video card was only usable with Windows. Offering alternative operating systems would have been a hassle to support and require complicated "product info" pages that explained what didn't work without Windows. For example, a Windows/Ubuntu notebook linked to in another comment offers Ubuntu with this disclaimer: "Great freeware. Conditions apply on upgrades, support and some drivers."

I don't think "unbundling" Windows would change our choices much. Dell offers a few models with Ubuntu, but Dell purposely chose components that they know have decent Linux drivers. Offering Ubuntu on most of their other models would probably be too much of a hassle to support (because of poor or semi-functional drivers).

But why?

Have a look at this laptop from a second-tier computer builder's website. Scroll about a third of the way down the page to the "Operating Systems" checkbox. Note that you can choose between None, Ubuntu, XP, and a collection of Vista versions.

Imagine a future version of the same field, but with "MacOS XVIII", "Plan 10" "FreeBeOS", "ReactOS Hurd", "AmigaOS Phoenix", etc, etc in the list. Real choice, in other words.

Now imagine a world where you could click any one of those OS choices and be confident your data would be usable, that you could connect to any network you needed to, that your investment in software would be portable. A world where you could choose your OS based on price, performance and personal taste, not on format lockin and obfuscated communication protocols.

That's the world Microsoft is fighting against.

I'd like to add... A default windows xp install does not have photoshop, framemaker, pagemaker, visio, access, quickbooks, a pdf converter either.

The article also states: "I also knew my way around UNIX and that allowed me to use Internet applications I hadn't used previously." This is WRT MacOSX. Why couldn't this be a Positive for Ubuntu also? Does it not share the Unix design?

"Windows XP comes preinstalled on every computer manufacturers' products with the exception of Apple." see http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060108-5928 .html
http://xtops.de/

Not to forget: http://pioneercomputers.com.au/ sells systems with Linux preinstalled.