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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.