Falling Hardware Prices Favor Linux

An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting arguing that, as hardware prices fall below $250 for laptops and desktops, Linux should gain as the Microsoft tax stands out in sharper relief. "In previous years, if you were spending US$1500 and up on a laptop, the Microsoft tax you were paying didn't seem like such a big deal. XP or Vista was pre-installed, fairly convenient... But as the price of hardware for small basic machines comes down, (think under US$250 by the end of next year), then software price starts to become a big issue. Why would you pay the price of your new laptop again just for the software, when all you want to do is really basic things?"

Comments

Perspective flip

[fyoder]

As hardware prices fall below OS cost, it will be possible for Microsoft to 'bundle' the hardware with the OS. Perhaps the next Windows family will be 'Windows Laptop', 'Windows Home Computer', 'Windows Server', each coming with the hardware pre-installed. The current situation only appears to be something of a conundrum because we are accustomed to thinking that the hardware should be the most expensive part.

Re:Perspective flip

[mewsenews]

The XBOX is the prototype for this.

hardware price decrases, system specs increase

[dioscaido]

OEM's don't have a lot of incentive for selling $250 computers, as the profit margins are very tight in such a low price ranges (even without MS tax). It's not like 06's $700 desktop can't be built today for $250, or '05's $700 destop couldn't be build for $250 in '06, and so on. As hardware prices fall, OEMs simply up the specs of their base systems so that they maintain their profit sweet spot.

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Xtifr]

Linux will never 'take off' until the Linux people stop answering almost every question with the equivalent of "Go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." Done and done. Oh, and BTW, there are no "the Linux people". You might as well criticise "the Microsoft people" based on the utterly clueless answers you'll get from a salesdroid at Best Buy. (If I based my opinion of MS on them...) But the fact is that Linux has taken off, and there are a wide variety of businesses and indivuduals selling and/or supporting Linux.

I'd say the biggest difference is that with Windows, the cost of support is somewhat built into the price of the system, whereas with Linux, it's frequently (though not always) packaged separately. This means that support for MS systems can be a great deal if you just have one system, but not such a good deal if you have hundreds. With Linux, it's frequently the reverse.

Of course, unpaid support for both systems is pretty problematic. But that's a separate matter. However, even there, Linux leads by having Ubuntu. MS has no equivalent of a free system with free support.

Re:MS Tax?

[Glonoinha]

It was a hypothetical question, and in the hypothetical question the 'pirated' disk was reinstalled using the numbers on the little sticker on the back, so in theory the original license does cover the 'pirated' version.

I'm a SuSE Desktop 10.1 user so it doesn't really matter - but it's a good exercise for the course, worth considering.

Advertised?

[tepples]

Walmart sells them, for starters. Brick and mortar, or online only? If I walked into a Wal-Mart store tomorrow, would I be able to walk out with a home workstation that runs GNU/Linux, or would I walk out empty-handed except for a pamphlet about how to get to Walmart.com? And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?

Pay for the codecs.

[Kadin2048]

ESR has a proposed solution to this in one of his essays: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

Basically, the solution is to build in an (optional) method to the mainstream Linux distributions so that users can purchase and install legitimate codecs, or get them with the distribution pre-installed. The parent company of Lindows purchased the rights to the codecs' IP already, so it's really a matter of taking them and working the licenses into Ubuntu or a similar, more popular distro.

Yes, this would make the resulting distro non-free, in the same way that pre-installing a proprietary video driver would, and it would mean that there would be a charge to the user for each machine that they got with Linux on it. However, it would still be far cheaper than Windows (remember: Windows has to pay for the same IP licenses, it's just built into the cost of the entire OS; with Linux, that would be your only cost), and as a result you'd get a machine that could deal with modern multimedia and video out of the box, or with at most a one-click install. None of the current hunting around on forums for instructions that come with a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, informational-purposes-only" disclaimers.