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simPC - Your Grandparents' New Computer?
trs9000 writes "The Register has a blurb about simPC, an "idiot-proof" PC set to debut in May of this year. It seems like a step towards a thin-client world, though it is aimed primarily at the elderly. For about $400 for the box and a $13-per-month subscription, users get a box with a propietary OS and software preinstalled for online banking, spam filtering, virus detection and online storage. What users don't get is the ability to install software, burn CDs or download large files. Initial release is only for the Netherlands and Belgium."
Haven't we seen these before? iOpener anyone?
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
So you pay for something which can't do most the things we find useful in a PC? Then we have to pay by the month? Hey lets just install Windows starter edition too, that way we'll have a PC which can't do anything.
I bet this is dead within 6 months because it's so stupid.
I like muppets.
With a $200 to $300 wholesale cost, they can make their money back in a year on a unit, not counting what they make with targetted advertising on their captive audience.
Lock in grandma to a 2 year contract and you're set!
Bundle in a few Tivo-esque features... they are already set for VOIP... might be the killer app(s) for the grandparents!
Agile Artisans
The unit can't burn CD's or do video editing.
In my experience this is precisely what elderly people want to do with their PC's.
I think a configured Mac mini with it's stable, easy to use operating system hooked up to a DSL router (ie it holds the connection for you - not the computer) is probably just as easy to use and has more of the stuff that grandparents actually want to do.
As a side note, the proprietry OS scares me. What happens when the company goes under and there's something wrong that prevents the OS from loading (like hardware failure). Say bye-bye to the last 5 years of photos and letters from the grandkids.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
If you're going to waste their money on a mac mini, why not just go for the el cheapo special from dell or someone and then install Linux on it? That'd cost them 400$ too (cheaper than lamer mini mac) and the monitor (and usually printer) come with it.
The Farewell Tour II
If SimPC is somewhat successful, it may validate that there is a market for managed PCs. Sun Ray now supports regular DSL/cable modem bandwith, so there is basically readily-available technology for companies to set up a completely hosted smart-card based service. I'll be really interested to see how SimPC does over the next couple of years.
It's kind of amusing, given the plethora of "well, duh, I'd get a Mac Mini" comments, to speculate what the response would have been like two days ago or, more importantly, what the people involved with this product were saying yesterday when Jobs unveiled it. Poor schmucks.
Now, anyone who's used the Sonicare knows that this thing really does a fantastic job on teeth and gums.
The Soniccare starts at $50. You can get a high quality, variable-speed vibrator for far less, and still have money for cheap dinner or a few drinks.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Monitor extra. Keyboard extra. Mouse extra. That's another $200 or so. Much more if you buy an Apple display. The Apple Mini comes in somewhere around $700.
you're supposed to turn it on after putting it in your mouth
I don't know what my neices are doing, but their PCs seem to soak up spyware like a sponge.
I know exactly what they're doing, and you can stop it. Firefox's XPI system has a whitelist of approved plug-in sources reviewed by actual human beings, unlike ActiveX where any spyware publisher that slips Verisign a couple hundred USD can get on the whitelist. If you have a good enough software firewall on the nieces' PC, you can implement your own whitelist and prohibit explorer.exe and iexplore.exe from accessing any host outside of Microsoft.com, which should block spyware but not Windows Update.
Is anybody else disturbed by the vibrator discussion that's about to start here? Did you people forget this is slashdot? Are the stars aligned just right today to make everybody horny?
mini Mac. No viruses. No spyware. Higher security. Let them download everything they want and enjoy the full multimedia experience with no restrictions.
Easier to use. As close to trouble-free as a computer can be, for the user and the tech support (you, their son or grandson).
Grandma still has spam and phishing to worry about, but what platform doesn't?
I've been on the "Buy Grandma a Macintosh" campaign for years. And now it makes more sense than ever.
I just finished setting my wife's grandmother up with a Mac. We all chipped in and found her a 600Mhz Snow iMac (summer 2001 model). I got it used for $395, and the CRT monitor will let us move to an easier resolution as her eyes wind down.
We also have her grandson across the street, and by buying her an Airport Base Station, we were able to connect her to his hi-speed internet.
I think Simple Finder could work, but in her case I just made a little AppleScript that opens Mail, Safari, iPhoto, iTunes, and iChat (She has 640MB RAM so there's no problem). I just want to let her launch everything with one touch, let her sort using Expose, and then quit when she wants.
No virus worries. Simple machine w/40GB drive. Damn cute looking. No noise (convection cooled). We may even add an iSight (600Mhz G3 is the minimum spec for this). This really is the perfect grandparent machine.
Please.... A subscription model for computing? That's -so- 1970s mainframe era....
Maybe I'm biased, but that doesn't mean they aren't nuts.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
" For $500 and $8.33 a month, you could get a Mac mini and do the same thing, with less viruses and spyware."
Wow. Someone didn't even read the Slashdot story summary.
HINT: It doesn't run Windows.
For $500 and $8.33 a month, you could get a Mac mini and do the same thing, with less viruses and spyware.
Oh, well, no discussion of a new device, computer, or OS is complete without a bunch of Macintosh folks saying that the Macintosh did it all better and did it all first.
But, no, the Mac Mini does not do this. Macintoshes are a little easier to maintain than Windows machines, but parents and grandparents can easily screw them up. I know: I have been in the position of fixing them.
Another problem with the Mac Mini is that parents and grandparents will buy random software and hardware and expect it to work. Because, contrary to what people would have us believe, many products for the Mac don't "just work" but require lots of fiddling, driver downloads, software updates, and weird configuration options, that translates into many hours of work for the kids.
Something like a SimPC for Email/Web and a PS/2 for games seems like a great choice for the parents/grandparents.
My parents are roughly retirement age; my father retired at the end of last year; my mom turns 65 in about a year. Although my father did work with IBM System 3 gear back in the 1960s, I am the "techie" in my branch of the family tree. (Strangely, my cousin Jon, born within a week of me, is also a techie, working for NeuStar or whatever their name is now. Must have been a solar flare around then...)
When I was a teen, they had Commodores. I went to college, got into the x86 architecture (though not into Windows) and after some years, my parents made the move to PC's as well. Most of my computer-owning relatives have PC's as well - my sister and her husband, aunts on both sides.
Now, I've had Macs for the last few years. I still have a Linux PC as well, but I've been making it clear to them that Windows is bad mojo, and - perhaps more importantly - that I am only going to offer them limited help with their Windows PC's. (I support Windows PC's for a living, and don't like doing it for free.) They've seen my Macs. They know I'm happy with them. And they know my Macs do nifty stuff and don't have the security problems Windows has.
My sister and her husband have a bad case of Mac envy right now, and are saving up for one. They had been saving for an $800 eMac, but boy, does that $500 Mac mini look appealing.
My parents just made a "things to buy" list, and there's an Apple logo on it. Again, I think the Mac mini will appeal to them, since they've already got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Where I'm going with this is: some grandparents and other people may buy a Simputer or whatever if they see Ed McMahon flogging it on an infomercial, but these days, a lot of folks have descendants or friends who are "tech-savvy," and they look to them for advice. And if those "tech-savvy" folks don't have, or don't like, a Simthingy, they'll be recommending something else, whether it's a PC or a Mac.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
It's working for the mobile phone industry. I'm paying (or rather the comapny is :-)) something like 5 quid a month (with 100 quid down at the start) for the computing device which I use to run my always-on telecoms application+alarm clock and anoyingly addictive pool game.
If you think of this box as a fixed-line equivalent of a modern mobule phone, rather than a PC equivalent it makes a bit more sense.
Mind you, Amstrad tried this in the UK with their emailer and that doesn't seem to have set the world on fire. ASDA (Walmart's UK tenticle) was more or less giving them away last I saw.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Even before the Mac mini, I would probably have said "never buy a computer called "the Simp".
Apart from the awful name the proprietary OS and monthly fee are a huge, massive turn off - what happens to your data when the monthly fee runs out? I am assuming that since they are meaning this for the simplest of folk that all data is held remotely and they own it, and it's in some wonky format they will be reluctant to free it from. Heck, even if the data is local to the box you may still have the data format issue.
And what about the aspect of accessing your bank through some unknown system? This thing could easily be a sham to spend a year gathering account numbers. It gives me the willies.
Just all around it screams to be avoided, existance of Mac mini excluded.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Excellent points.
Building a PC for people who are afraid of them and/or have limited physical capabilities is not (only) about reducing the feature set, but about adding usability features.
Voice recognition and output, scaling/zooming textg and graphics (which should be supported everywhere), consistent user interface design etc. are features that would make life easier so much easier not only for elder people, but also for small children and disabled people.
Not exactly small markets.
No, those are actually additions that help the drivers. Sorry, I can't see how a PC on which you can't install software even compares to a car with ABS and power-assisted steering.
Most people actually _want_ ABS, TCS, ESP and other aides on their cars. Might not want a price hike for them, but they do want a car that brakes over a shorter distance or which doesn't go in a spin if you go too fast in a curve. That's just the kind of good stuff that the car industry did to help the users.
On the other hand, I have never heard anyone saying "damn, if my PC stopped me from installing all those games, I'd be so much happier." That's stuff nobody wants, actually, and which is born just out of the arrogance of blaming one's users and calling them idiots.
Basically the difference there is that the car industry treats you as a _user_, not as an idiot. They've asked themselves "how can we make it easier and safer for the user?" or "what would the user want in a car?" instead of "how can we stop those idiots from breaking our perfect product?"
Adding, for example, full use of the NX (No eXecute) flag, now that would be comparable to ABS. Yes, theoretically it's some extra limitation, just like ABS or TCS are, but in practice it's something which actually helps the users without putting much actual restrictions on them.
But that's also the kind of thing that needs one to start thinking of those people as "users" not as "idiots". When someone at AMD came up with that flag, you can be sure that that was one person who finally thought "ok, the users have a real problem. How do we help them?" It's a simple and elegant solution, but it starts with acknowledging that a problem exists, and that no, it's not enough to whine about those idiot lusers who click on all those crap links.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Instead of seeing yet another crippled product that's supposedly "idiot-proof", or "designed for idiots", I'd like to see one which does what the car industry did. Again: design it for _users_, not for idiots. E.g., a product about which they can claim with a straight face stuff like:
- "we did a complete code review, _and_ have an extensive battery of automated tests which tries to overflow _every_ _single_ buffer used in the program."
- "and additionally we make sure all buffers are in data segments flagged as NX"
- "we ship with a firewall activated by default, _and_ which needs one to physically flip a physical switch, to reconfigure or deactivate it. So no spyware or virus can automatically nuke it."
- "we have a spyware remover installed by default, with a daily updated list, and we have the balls to call Claria/Gator spyware. And, oh, our browser automatically pops a warning message when the user tries to install something that's on that list."
Etc. That's the kinds of things that would be the computer equivalent of TCS, ABS, ESP and so on. And then you won't need to cripple it to give it grandma. But you won't have them until someone stops blaming their users for all the problems.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.