Slashdot Mirror
PC Prices Reach $300 Milestone
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Prices for fully loaded, name-brand PCs have slipped below $300 in the last few weeks, a major milestone. 'Ten or so years ago, when PCs cost five or even 10 times what they do now, it was common for analysts to say that they would never become a staple in homes until they were priced the way consumer electronics were, usually defined as costing less than $300,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'In the days when PCs were $2,000 and even more, that target seemed to be something of a fantasy. Now, PCs cost less than some telephones--and less than a lot of TV sets--and can be found in roughly three-quarters of U.S. homes. But while they are priced like consumer electronics, the machines still aren't even remotely as easy to use, and the trend lines there aren't particularly encouraging.'"
Wouldn't it be nice if Dell preconfigured Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and stripped out some of the junk in Microsoft Windows?
I could be wrong, but hasn't Walmart been selling PCs for $199 for a year or so now? Isn't this guy a little late to the party?
Pythagoras would be so proud of us.
Probably offtopic, but if the submitter is really from the WSJ, it's a sign of how mainstream Slashdot has become that it now gets stories from the ultimate bastion of stuffed-shirt corporate America.
How much does an OEM copy of Windows cost these days? This must affect the final price quite considerably.
As prices have fallen, I've quickly reached a point where getting a new machine every 6-12 months is pretty normal (though I still tend to stay on the lower end of the spectrum). However, people still keep wanting advice on keeping their 700Mhz machine running when it's clearly not working so well anymorre. I just picked up a 1.1Ghz/256MB/40GB machine last week for $100. I still tend to put lower end machines to use (firewalls, fileservers, webservers, etc.), but for general consumers, PC's have reached disposable pricing. When you look at what places like GeekSquad charge per hour for diagnosis and repair, it gets pretty hard to recommend anything other than a new box when things go bad.
When asked, "I've got this problem. How would you fix it?" I now pretty much just say, "Personally, I'd just buy a new machine."
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
It is a pity that the average consumer still believes that a computer is like any other home appliance - it should last, unattended and with little regular maintenance, for years upon years. Computers are not like refrigerators or microwaves or dishwashers - they are a category of their own. They /do/ require regular upkeep via software and regular cleaning of the hardware. Unless you've got a case that has an Ionic Breeze built into it (I challenge thee, O gladiators of Slashdot), your computer gets dusty.
It won't be until computers are in the $100 price range that the average consumer thinks of them the way a lot of enthusiasts do: a tool with perqs.
Until that time, people like us can make money as Mr. Fix-its and computational handymen.
Then there is the other commonly heard phrase: "Well, you fixed it a week ago and it's broke again." To which I normally respond (at least to the people I call friends): "Have you used it since I fixed it?"
Computers don't break themselves. Users break computers.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Let's face it, most people have a hard enough time dealing with the remote control. You have the universal remotes that control TV, VCR/DVD, and other devices. Computers have many more features than these consumer electronic devices offer, so of course they won't be as easy to use.
It also depends on what you plan to do with your computer. If you use Quickbooks for example, that program alone has more complexity than most home theaters. The more complex tasks are that you do on a computer, the more complex the use of the computer tends to become. A dedicated web browser is closer to what these people want. They don't want a computer, they want something dedicated to running a single program.
Dell and other OEMs add so much junk to a computer that it also complicates things for many end-users. Most never use the pre-installed programs on these computers and buy their own or have a friend recomend the best ones to use and then use them. Of course, they still have the original junk left behind. How many systems have both MS Works and MS Office installed on them? How about all the stupid support tools that most people never want? They add complexity without functionality.
As the level of computer knowledge rises in the general public, stupid articles complaining about computer complexity will go away. I give it another 30 years or so.
I disagree. Purely on the grounds that many users have Windows experience from office work, and also because Gnome and KDE are both built on the same principles as Windows XP and use exactly the same concepts. There's no usability advantage to Linux when configured thus.
An obvious security advantage, yes, but at the cost of obscurity. I build PCs for home users and I find it very difficult to sell Linux and mac based systems because users insist on being able to run the educational/edu-tainment titles they can buy in PCWorld (here in the UK) or presumably CompUSA on your side of the pond
Ultimately, home users want Windows and are generally willing to pay out for NAT routers, antivirus and anti-spyware apps to protect them from the consequences. As an aside, the cheapest branded PCs you can buy in the UK are about £300, which considering the state of the Dollar on the foreign exchange markets is a bit of a rip-off...
You can get a Mac mini for the same price (no monitor though)!
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I don't know if I'd want a computer that worked like a cell phone.
o ws-exploit-catagory-is-today worries at all. I don't think browsing the web, reading email, and opening various documents is harder on windows, nor is fixing windows any easier than linux - in fact it may very well be easier to fix windows (that's nother discussion), but the shear frequency of the need to fix windows itself seems to represent one of the factors in determining people's perception of how easy it is to use. You can't talk to somebody about computers for five minutes without the topic of viruses comming up. Most 'hard-core' windows users/advocates seem to see viruses, worms and the like as an unavoidable part of computing. Maybe if MS would clean up its act, computers would be as easy to use as cell phones.
As for how easy computers are to use, I put my roommate, just an average consumer-grade computer user, down in front of my thinkpad running Debian (testing), and she was browsing the web, reading email, and doing research without a lick of help from me. Her response to "its running linux" was "what's that?"
Easy to use, and no virus/trojan/worm/zombie/whatever-the-latest-wind
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Ten or so years ago, when PCs cost five or even 10 times what they do now
In the early 90s, an Atari ST cost about $400.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I question the wisdom behind making such cheap computers. It seems to me that such cheap goods will encourage a "disposable" mentality to the computers. When this happens we can expect to see people merely throwing their old computers out on a scale worse than today.
Computers seem to be the new styrofoam cup: we use them for a while, but they're with us forever. In my most humble opinion, I think the industry as a whole halt their progression towards ever cheaper computers for a while and instead focus on making fully recyclable computers.
I really thing the computing industry and especially the software industry needs to grow up, seriously. There need to be better standardisation. Note that Windows is not a standard as Windows isnt compatible with windows even between variuos upgrades.
Using a computer today demands you know exactly what you are doing and why, For your casual surfer or media user that should not be tha case. All they need to know is where to go and what to watch. Its the OS that demands the users help, not the other way around. No sane user wants to maintain the computer. He do it because he have to.
The fast solution is cramming out specialized computers but that hits the wall pretty quick because of the lack of real standards on the net.
Until we have some sane (widely used by even Microsoft) standards for the web nothing will change and every appliance will fall flat on its face. The industry created this mess with their "not invented here" syndrome and they are the ones who should clean the mess up.
HTTP/1.1 400
One of the main reasons that we have cheap PC's can be traced back to the company "Emachines." God knows how many people bought an Emachines PC before they were bought by Dell and paid for their cheap PC with their hard earned cash, only for them to just plain die due to shitty-ass components. Emachines made HP and Compaq go "Oh shit, somebody finally figured us out; that it does not cost anything near the $3,000 we have been charging for a shitty-ass PC" Oh, and fuck Linux. If you hate Microsoft, just buy a Mactel now. :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
wasn't the Commodore VIC-20 available for $300 when brand new? You could buy it off the shelf at May D&F. I still have mine. Hooked it up a few months ago, dialed into a shell account with victerm using my 300 baud vicmodem with manual dial and looked at slashdot on lynx :)
The big issue here is that they should put in more RAM into the computer.
You really want at least 512 MB for Windows XP Home or a full install of current commercial Linux distributions for things to work decently fast. When you reach 1 GB of RAM installed (most current motherboards can handle this), the only time you need a faster CPU is to run the latest games or run high-end multimedia-editing programs. The big advantage of installing more RAM is that you drastically reduce hard disk memory virtualization, a process that can drastically slow down your computer.
It looks pretty, and I'm not going to dispute it takes a fair bit of computing power and some programming prowess to make the computer copy a file when you drag an icon -- but it really isn't what you'd expect to happen. Dragging and dropping suggests moving, not copying. Maybe if you had to click the middle or right button while dragging with the left to deposit a copy. Or if you had to drag it to some representation of a copying machine, which would then create a copy icon in its "output tray" that you could put somewhere else. But now you've added complication to the process
Typing cp old_filename new_filename isn't half so counter-intuitive, once you can get your head round three notions: (1) the computer will do what you ask it, but you must phrase it precisely; (2) every file has a name; (3) cp is short for "copy".
I think we need to do more studies with the bash prompt. I'm not saying give up on GUIs altogether -- they work in some applications. But there is definitely such a thing as stretching a metaphor, and using a GUI for file management is an example. {OTOH, the old Amiga file managers [SID, Directory Opus &c.] -- with two windows and buttons below -- were quite reasonable}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You are so full of shit, it's not even funny.
Pick any random hardware out there today and Linux is a hell of a lot more likely to support it than OS X.
How do I know? Well, there was no way to get an HP-Photosmart 1000 printer going in OS X just this past weekend. Linux, plug and play.
Same thing for a bunch of old scanners that were donated at the community center where I work in the weekends.
With regards to XP, let's just say that I was buy a Brother Laser printer this weekend and have the people at the store were complaining about how they have this scanner that used to work in Windows 2000, but now doesn't work with XP.
The store monkey's response? Get a new scanner.
Some other lady in line before me is buying upwards of $120 in virus scanners, spyware removals and firewall bullshit. Yeap, XP is a usability dream.
For what is worth, Linux support for digital cams is quite good. And another note, a very small percentage of people are doing video editing these days. It's still word processing, email, web and some mp3s for most folks, but don't let me stop you from spouting the delusional party line.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
I have 256 MB of RAM and a DVD-ROM drive in my $300 Dell. There's a "2.4 GHz Celeron," whatever that means. I use the computer for running Quicken and a few other apps that are Windows-only. I don't play games on it. It works great as a basic home machine, and for $120 more they'll actually support it for two years.
The only irritant is all the upselling Dell tries to do: "We've preloaded McAfee Security Suite, but you're not truly secure unless you Go Pro for only $50!" By contrast, Apple just begs you for $30 to play QuickTime movies in full-screen until you figure out the AppleScript workaround or warez the stupid player.
For more information, click here.
IIRC, the C64 was selling for $179 towards the end of its lifespan.
This is due to the volume of machines Commodore was stamping out. There's a reason everyone seems to have a C=64 in their closet. Commodore sold more than 33 million of the little buggers, more than ANY OTHER computer model ever made, even to this day. The only other machine that even comes close was the Apple II, which sold for 12 years continuously with only minor modifications.
The sad irony is that most books which talk about the home computer revolution in computing history concentrate on Apple/IBM/Microsoft, and conviently forget about the C=64, the home PC which truely changed the world, and one of the most popular machines ever created.
And yes, I still have mine.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
For the people who seem to think that 300$ pc won't be enough:
Most of users of pc buy it for mainly the word-processing/ checking e-mails and at most download songs (and may be to see porn..). A decent pc with 1.5MHz celeron processor with 256 MB DDR RAM and 400MHz FSB should be enough for doing all these chores.
If you want to play games..get a XBOX or PS2.
If you want to tape your shows..use Tivo or a DVR.
- Sh!t
It seems nobody here stopped to mention this yet, but it occurs to me that the big reason we've reached this "milestone" is thanks to slave labor!
The PC market has been depressed for a long time now. That new Dell PC with the latest generation of CPU and 512MB of RAM standard shouldn't really be selling for only $399.95. It only does because they can get Chinese workers to assemble the things for them for pennies per day.
And this carries over to ALL aspects of that PC, including the plastic molding process that makes the case! (A while back, I looked into getting a case made for a prototype product we were thiking of marketing. While there a a number of businesses in the U.S. that will do the injection molding process - they practically *all* informed me that I'd be wise to have the mass production of the end-result done in China or Taiwan. They simply couldn't compete at all on price for quantities. It seems they do most of their business helping someone get the very first sample done, and then selling you the molds that it was made with.)
I know many people say "So what? It's a global economy now!" and all that... But I'm not sure we can really preach and claim to be about such things as "freedom" or "individual rights" while letting our own economy slowly collapse. The U.S. doesn't seem like we export any technology anymore! (Heck, what do we export lately other than a lot of our jobs?!)
Being very much a "free market" proponent, it's almost hard to admit this. But right now, we're just not working on the same "playing field". I think the large nations of the world are going to have to get together and agree to add some steep tarriffs to goods imported from 3rd. world countries (and anyone using what amounts to slave labor practices to build their products).
You guys are dorks for buying phones that expensive. Cell phones are idiotic anyway, and all their features are bloat. Your phone should do one thing ... transmit calls. Screw your cameras and ringtones and blue LEDs and all that other garbage. People are starving while you think you are oh so cool. Get in touch with reality. This is the problem with America.
That has not been my experience [that it really does just "plug in and work", like an appliance].
/Applications to make space... and it kept on "just working". Her PC, I'd been having to reinstall every 3-6 months. That's why it's worth a bit more... the PC may be priced like an appliance, but the Mac is an appliance.
What didn't "just plug in and work"? You didn't say that.
I got my employers to buy me a mac mini for evaluation purposes. The idea was to put the code developers on native Xwindows instead installing Xservers on Windows XP systems.
You're using a Mac mini for software development? Um, dude, OK, you can do that... but that's not exactly a $300 PC job.
You can't do anything meaningful with a mac mini until you quadruple the memory, was what I found.
Double is more than enough unless you're building a compile engine or something, if you're just using it as an X console, well, I'm using an old Powermac with 256M at work... and it works at least as well for that as the company-provided PC with half a gig. And that X server software isn't cheap: a licensed copy of Unixlink pays for a gig of RAM for a mini, a licensed copy of Exceed costs as much as a mini all by itself. Or are you leaving those costs out of your comparison?
But 512M is a price/capability sweet spot... that's what I ended up getting in mine, and the extra cost of the RAM was comparable to the cost of the same extra RAM I needed when I last upgraded my son's PC: that $300 PC doesn't come with enough RAM either. In my opinion both Apple and HPDELL are shortchanging buyers there, but Apple no more than anyone else.
The mouse and keyboard? $20 total if you shop around, and if you pay more than $50 you're not even trying to be frugal.
Display? Same displays as the PCs.
And don't forget the value of "it just works". My daughter switched from a PC to an old iMac. She ended up really abusing the Mac... going in and randomly deleting files from
So you need to add 750MB to the mini to make it work? I have not found that to be true. You only get 256MB with the Dell. I have found 256 MB on a PC to be next to useless also.
/. and everything is redundant but go spec out your $299 Dell with firewire, antivirus software, DVI, 1 year warranty, and XP Pro and come back with a total showing how much you saved including your @3%**/&&@@# time fighting to get your no name ebay junk cards and software to work. Apple isn't building a computer for the special needs of one person but a wide selection of needs.
Want to play a DVD on the Dell nope sorry that is extra and you can't even add it in a custom build so you have to buy a 3rd party one and throw your CD-RW away because there is only one bay.
Your Dell breaks on the 91st day sorry not covered only a 90 day warranty.
You want to hook your Dell to you plasma TV sorry can't no DVI port. You want to hook your Dell to your Sony camcorder nope sorry no Firewire.
Did you get your spyware and virus protection for the mini oops not needed but you better add that to the Dell.
You want to toss your Dell in your carry on bag so you can work at a remote site oops can't it is bigger then the size of a carry on bag.
You want to connect your Dell to a Windows network sorry you can't you only have XP Home I guess you have to pay for XP Pro upgrade.
I won't even mention the software that comes free on the mini that isn't available on the PC.
Your right I can see where I would save so much more running a Dell then a mini. I can tell every one sorry I can't do that on my Dell because I didn't pony up an additional $500 which means no work I can look at more p0rn sites with the extra time I have.
I can buy a shit monitor for like the Dell for $107 at Sam's Club. I can buy a wireless USB mice and keyboard for $20 all day long. I can see where you equate a monitor, mouse and keyboard with doubling the price of a mini.
I know this is
You might be suffering from that terrible disease that has inflicted PC people for years If-I-Buyitias.
The sure signs of If-I-Buyitias
1. My PC is cheaper then a Mac
2. My PC can do that too if I buy x hardware.
3. My PC can do that too if I buy x software.
4. I need the expansion of my PC incase I ever need to add something that is built into the Mac.
5. Na uh my PC is better as you are running fdisk for the 3rd time this year cuz you was 0wned again.
Maybe you can see if this is a chronic disease and get a disability from the Social Security Administration.
-- To mess up an OS X box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.--
The problem here is that she is learning to follow step-by-step instructions - and not learning to abstract what is actually happening. I notice this a lot when I'm helping non-techy people.
This is exactly right. It was also well outlined in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. Basically he details how various GUI's are a brutal facade over the actual functions you perform on a PC, and how this level of abstraction can be terribly confusing for people, instead of helping the user like they're intended to.
It's a good food-for-thought essay, and its a very fast read. I recommend it for anyone that's a fan of computer history. I believe its even available online somewhere (legally) in plaintext.
Under MSwindows it's not a $300 PC job, but you're getting close at $600, and you can do major software devel on a 486 with 16 MB if you know how to use a linux or BSD system from the CLI. I salvaged all the computers I have at home, incidentally - a couple of hours of dumpster diving was the total cost to me.
But, you do make a good point - out of the box, the machine is not suitable for my kind of use, and Apple never said it was, either. I was purposely testing it beyond the vendor's paradigm and the mac afficionados really don't need to get upset that I didn't have a religous epiphany as soon as I touched the case.
The cost of an Xserver, or any of the other apps people have mentioned, are $0.00 on the PC platforms I use; they are also negligible on my linux laptop (there is a hidden cost there in terms of my labor, since Xwindows installation on a laptop is not usually plug-n-play like it is on cheap generic hardware).
Thanks for the info (really!)... once I realised the problems I was having were basically symptoms of memory starvation, I jumped it up to 4X based on what some other users were saying on the 'net. I din't want to have to do it twice
I do need to be able to compile major code, but as you mentioned all the cheap machines require memory upgrades, regardless of architecture. Hard to believe we tested the Peacekeeper missile's launch system on a machine with 1 MB of RAM total!
As for anecdotal evidence, well, there's no doubt that individual users have different bad habits and comfort levels. I find that GUIs are slow, limiting, and crash-prone because I am comfortable with a CLI; my sister greatly prefers MSwindows (she is an author, musician and former Apple user) and my father prefers MacOS (he is a retired rocket scientist who has used mainframes, DOS PCs, and most versions of windows). Each of us can validly claim "it just works" because that's true for each of us in his or her most comfortable creative environment.