Slashdot Mirror
War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front
The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting look at the war brewing on the inexpensive laptop front. With everything from the Eee PC to the OLPC, the trend in slimming and trimming seems to be continuing. "The market segment is so new it doesn't have a name yet or even an agreed-upon set of specifications. Intel, the chipmaker, calls the category "netbooks," recognizing that much of what people do on their laptops involves going on the Net. The new machines are also being called ultra-low-cost PCs, mininotebooks, or even mobile Internet gadgets. In appearance, they have the familiar clamshell design, but they're smaller, with seven- to 10-inch screens. They offer full keyboards (albeit with smaller keys) and weigh less than three pounds. Perhaps most important, the majority cost less than $500 - some as little as $299. Intel says it expects more than 50 million of these netbooks to be sold by 2011. It's introduced a tiny, low-power processor to run them called Atom, which puts 47 million transistors on a chip about the size of a penny."
It seems like when you're dealing with price points of one to several hundred dollars, this is a big deal for free software, specifically Linux. When you're talking about adding anywhere from 25% to 100% of the cost of the computer just for the operating system, it paints things in a different light. That, and you'd have to put an older (soon to be non-supported) version of Windows (XP) on the thing. I can't see these running Vista anytime in the near future.
Should be interesting to see how this impacts the OS playing field...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I bought a $300 laptop with Vista... there's no saying MS can't be (or already aren't, as has been documented) flexible with their OEM pricing scheme to accommodate lower priced hardware (or loss leaders for that matter)
As a Systems Administrator, I just need a device that can give me Internet and shell access. When I travel to customer sites or abroad, I absolutely loath lugging around a laptop. What Admin doesn't wish they had a small portable device for connecting to LOM's, Devices, or Serial Consoles? With a USB RS-232 Serial Adapter and WiFi, one can reasonably do it all with less.
My Eee PC with Slackware 12.1 is probably the best thing I could have hoped for. It just does everything a UNIX Admin needs and is very compact... now I have more room for my Frappacino's and O-Scope in my bag!
Gotta be thankful Technology is getting to the point where smaller is becoming affordable.
while I can see that some people will want XP on their eeepc (my ex boss for example is adamant that he wants it) I bought mine preloaded with linux before the XP ones were mentioned (although there are instructions in the book on how to go about installing XP on it) I thought I would probably put XP on it as I am an Microsoft guy and work in a Microsoft house and avoid Linux mainly because I am put off by the whinging fanbois all the time but I have yet to find something that it does not do quite comfortably with the xandros install that XP would provide. I use it for surfing the web (I am on it right now) and all those things where you want a device that boots in under 16 seconds (like flicking it on to check the bus timetable, using it as a streaming radio by my bedside and updating my twitter). I can see why people will want to buy the XP version but they should really buy the linux version (which has a bigger HD in the new generation 9in ones) and then decide later if they want to pop XP on it.
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk