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Asus Set To Release Desktop Eee PC Variant
the_leander writes "The Register has pictures of the desktop version of Asus's Eee PC, reportedly called the 'Ebox.' It will be released early next month after it has been unveiled publicly at Computex in Taipei on June 3. It'll come equipped with the same Xandros Linux distribution as the Eee, though it's likely that Windows XP will be available also. But given the probable choice for CPU, Atom, ithe Ebox is unlikely to allow for the use of Vista, unless you're something of a masochist. It's expected to retail for $200-$300."
I like the looks of it, but where is the floppy drive?
Pretty is just as cheap to mass produce as ugly. GM should take a lesson.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
That's what I thought when I saw it. Sweet deal.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It's like a portable desktop...
Seriously, if it is slim and small enough I can clearly think of several nice uses. It's a perfect living room pc, a kitchen computer ( I dont want my mom to get my laptop dirty when browsing recipes ), a car pc (someone would definitely do this), what else.. ohhh.. and a beowulf cluster, imagine a server rack of these..
People buy desktops for connecting to backend office infrastructure, and sad to say, the Windows-Office lockin still rules in this space. Skype and other stuff like Image manipulation might make sense in the Home Linux market, but there are already plenty cheap hardware out there that can run Linux for under $200. The gBox for one.
So Asus will find it very hard to push these desktops unless they race to the bottom. Which might rule out Windows XP as well.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I don't see how any of this matters in a desktop.
The RV folks like a battery friendly PC. As a marine map display for boat use, or a topo map unit, these would make fantastic GPS map display units and double as an entertainment server for movies and music. Battery life with a 300 watt PC sucks. A sub 60 watt unit is more along the lines of usable in the evenings on battery power.
The truth shall set you free!
People won't just buy it for its price or features, they'll also buy it for the wow factor. If the production cost difference is minimal, why not go the extra distance?
Where I am, the EeePC is outselling other competitors (Classmate, Astone UMPC) precisely because of that. Sure, it's pricier, but you won't get embarrassed whipping it out in a café.
Looks like the EBox was designed to look like a Wii.
Fixed that for you.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
...It'll come in windows and linux flavours, but the linux one will have half the ram and hdd capacity as the windows version and cost a twice as much due to 'lesser availability'.
Actually, for the announced configurations, the Eee 900 with Linux will have 20G flash (instead of 12G) and be slightly more expensive as a result. A fair tradeoff.
For the HP 2133, the Linux versions are consistently cheaper than the equivalent Windows versions.
So, direct your anger elsewhere. These mini laptops have been good for Linux.
Not my fault, honest!
Seriously though, I'd put in a link to the inquirer as well (they had larger pictures of this device), which was removed and had forgotten to add the price. This was my first ever submission to Slashdot so I had actually run a spell check. What I submitted was error free.
Thank you editors. I really did need the pedant hoards blasting me for this...
regards, the_leander
You can get a year old regular desktop for the same price and run an operating system of your choice,
You can get a big, noisy, ugly, year old desktop, high power-consuming, requiring an O/S reinstall, along with hunting down all the applications (a no-no for the masses), with god-only-knows-what sort of hardware problems.
Or you can get one of these things - and have all common workflows (skype, office, google, music) working out of the box.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
You must have missed the memo, but Microsoft does not want you to be able to buy XP anymore. Everyone is supposed to move to Vista. So it is *most definitely* newsworthy if manufacturers are introducing *new products* a year and a half (!!) after Vista has been released to the public, *and they explicitly do not support the newest Microsoft OS at all*, although they do support the previous version - even though you're not even supposed to be able to buy that version anymore, at least not without jumping through all kinds of hoops. Hello? I consider this to be extremely newsworthy.
The EEE Laptops run Ubuntu just fine. I would be very surprised if these desktop versions wouldn't. Whether you could turn them into a Hackintosh is kindof a moot point IMO, but probably you could, at least if OS X happens to support the specific hardware they used. Please "get the facts" first next time, thanks.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The very fact that long-time PC manufacturers are designing systems that "are not designed to run Vista" a year and a half after it has been released is about as significant news as you could possibly get, with regards to the PC market in any case.
The only reason when you might have considered it less relevant, would have been if the systems where not selling well at all. So, have you bothered to check Amazons Bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware list lately? (Amazon being by far the largest online reseller that sells Apple, Asus EEE PC as well as Vista laptops?). The list updates hourly, but currently the first Vista laptop is at spot number 4. The Asus EEE PC used to be at 1 for over a week, and I guess the only reason why it currently isn't, is because they are out of stock everywhere. So it's currently in second place, flanked by Macbooks at place 1 and 3. So basically Microsofts margins are getting squeezed here from two directions at once: Apple at the high end, EEE PC's at the low end.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Sure, but it might save your life. Read about it in this book. When you are downwind from a big fire, set fire to the grass in front of you, then walk into the burned patch.
Define "few" years, please. I started using Linux in 1995 with the Yggdrasil "plug and play" distribution. At that time it was more or less like what the Microsoft shills claim, but still I was able to install and run it in less than an hour, without any outside help. Google didn't exist at the time and I had never met anyone who had ever used Linux.
Compared to that, at about the same period it took me nearly a week and several consultations with other people until I got Windows 95 to run on the same machine. The hardware drivers had to be carefully configured and installed in a precise sequence to boot windows 95, even though it had been running windows 3.11 before. So, even if Linux was in an extremely primitive state for the common user at the time, it wasn't any more difficult to install and configure than windows.
For normal use today, I think Linux with KDE is easier to use than XP (I have never tried Vista). For one thing, the "K" or "Start" menu is nicely organized, divided by application type instead of by software provider. Also, It's much easier to search and install software: click on "Add/Remove programs", search by keyword, click on "install" and "apply changes", and that's it. And copy/paste is easier too: select with the mouse, middle-click to paste. One handed, no need to CTRL-C, CTRL-V. And so on, etc, etc.
Now, if you think it's off-topic to mention Vista in a discussion about Linux, think again: why is it that Linux is mentioned 177000 times in the Microsoft website? It's always on-topic to mention the alternatives, of course.