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HP Sells Cheap FreeDOS PC in China
Johan writes "HP has started selling a Yuan 3,999 ($483) PC in China. The cool part is that it runs FreeDOS! Not sure why FreeDOS was chosen, but I suspect they expect it to be replaced with Linux or Windows by the user. By not having to pay for Windows, they are able to include better hardware. They probably didn't want the support burden of bundling the PC with a Linux distribution." And while we're on China, Cringely has some prognostication and speculation about IBM's sale of their PC division to a Chinese company.
Anytime a major vendor starts shipping affordable (and hopefully quality) consumer boxes that are free from the Microsoft tax, I get that warm fuzzy feeling.
Then again I suppose my G4 iBook counts too.
Er, it doesn't say if it includes a monitor. If it doesn't then that is a lousy price. Both HP and Dell sell their low end PC's for $350 here in the U.S. Even with a flatscreen the dell cost is $539 with printer and XP Home edition. That for a P4 3.8 ghz with 236megs ram.
"Losers in the deal are HP, Intel, and Sun. Especially Sun. Those guys are in trouble."
Especially HP. Those guys are the losers. Their hardware is cheaply made and getting worse by the month while their main competitor Dell is still chugging along eating up the market. It's too bad HP won't spin off the printer division (the only people in that company with a decent product) so they can make a profit.
They are competing with local white box vendors selling machines running pirated copies of windows. They can't actually preinstall pirated Windows themselves, because between being rather large, and being based in the US, they would be an easy target to be sued, but they can put a token OS that nobody in their right mind will actually use, ensuring it is replaced by the user with an almost-free pirated copy of Windows.
Here, in India, there are already a lot of PCs sold by compaq that have freedos or caldera dos installed.
Perhaps there is a similar situation in China.
No. The yuan, officially named the renminbi, has been fixed at around 8.27 to the US dollar for nearly a decade, and it is very convertible at that rate.
when the chinese move to their own processor design - which they can do anytime if they decide to run Linux .
This is not a signature.
FreeDOS is not realy useful but it is good enough to run some basic harware validation testes. It will also minimize the support issues. Customers that buy a FreeDOS machine will likely have to replace it with either Linux or a [pirated] version of Windoze. If customers call for support they are out of luck. It no longer a prestine system as it was shipped from the manufacture.
No, it's not the best quality, but it's Great Quality (that's the brand name -- geddit, huh? huh
But seriously, I've bought three of the $200 Great Quality machines from Fry's, and actually the quality has been quite good. They're made in Taiwan, BTW -- I don't know if that would prevent them from being exported to PRC.
I'm sorry, but $483 doesn't even sound like a cheap price by my U.S. standards, forget about China! You can make a heck of a good high-end PC yourself for about $600 (high-end meaning a big hard disk and a pretty darn fast CPU, although maybe not the very fastest CPU or fanciest 3-d video card for gaming); producing them in quantity, they should easily be $450 to $500-ish. If anybody is still paying $1000 for a PC in this day and age, I assume it's a pretty serious server box (or maybe a very bleeding-edge gaming machine, where you pay an extra $500 for an extra 10% in performance).
It's kind of pathetic that the CNN article doesn't give any specs, doesn't provide any links, and doesn't say whether the machine comes with a monitor.
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