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.

Comments

Free from the MS Tax - Nice

[MooseByte]

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. ;-)

$483???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here

[northcat]

Here, in India, there are already a lot of PCs sold by compaq that have freedos or caldera dos installed.

The s**t will hit

[ehack]

when the chinese move to their own processor design - which they can do anytime if they decide to run Linux .

Re:The s**t will hit

[Amiga Trombone]

Under one of the stipulations for many industries (automotive was the focus for this article), the Western corp must:

* Partner with a Chinese company
* Share design and technical info
* License design and IP in such a way that the partner company can create new designs from the original and derivative works are owned by the Chinese company

Well, tying the two stories together, it doesn't look like IBM is going to have any problem with that

Re:Uh

[bcrowell]

Sure it's not the best quality, but if you need a computer and are poor, $99 sure beats nearly $500.
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.