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$250 Freescale-Based "Green" "Cloud" Computer
An anonymous reader sends word of the CherryPal, a tiny desktop computer that its maker says will consume just 2 watts. It uses a Freescale processor that runs Linux and has no moving parts. The CherryPal has integrated software and an embedded Linux (based on Debian) that has been stripped down to support Open Office, Firefox, iTunes, instant messaging, and multimedia access locally. More applications are available in the cloud, and 50 GB of cloud storage is included. It comes without keyboard or mouse but with ports for VGA, USB, Ethernet, and built-in Wi-Fi. It's claimed that the CherryPal will boot up in 20 seconds from 4 GB of flash. They've buried Linux so that the end user doesn't see it; the entire UI is presented through Firefox. The CherryPal site says: "There's no software or upgrades to install, no risk of viruses, and no operating system to deal with and free 24/7 support."
so buying a throw-away brick is now considered green?
How? The article is more confusing than informative on this aspect...
If this works with digital cameras and has even basic photo support I may have found a computer for mom. Every time I come home there's a camera that hasn't been offloaded since last time I was home.
The problem with this device is that it isn't that much cheaper than a full budget PC that will whack this into the ground.
$250 for what is essentially a DTV receiver (my ex had a £25 Sagem Freeview receiver that had an integrated 250MHz PowerPC) with 4GB flash... sure it comes with 50GB of online storage, but they haven't reduced the affordability.
Having 'someone else' responsible for configuring, upgrading, and maintaining my personal computer would have some nice benefits, but I still prefer the ability to be responsible for myself. I wonder if there's a correlation between this, and political beliefs (free republic government vs central controled regime).
* no extra usb jack, so no uploading pictures, printing, scanning, using a thumb drive, or loading your ipod
Or you could spend the extra couple of dollars and buy a decent USB keyboard with a couple of ports built in and use those ports. USB is chainable.
Erik
Standards on slashdot seem to be decreasing these days. If you're too lazy to RTFA, at least RTFT, or at least RTFFWT (read the fine first word of the title). $250 Freescale-based "green" "cloud" computer
With a powered USB hub and a USB sound port, and custom firmware, you should be good to go for VoIP and the rest.
Let's hope they left open some way to flash the kernel.
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I'll bet they run iTunes on their server and stream it. You will want to keep your music on the 50GB of network storage anyhow.
For the same price you could easily build the identical machine with a real OS
I think you might want to clarify what you said, as many here will take that as a cheap shot at Linux, which is a far better OS than XP. I have no experience with OSX and can't judge between it and Linux, but Linux is indeed a real OS and far, far superior to anything Microsoft produces.
Linux will run on anything from a wristwatch to a supercomputer. In fact, the world's third fastest computer runs Linux.
I think what you meant was "For the same price you could easily build the identical machine with the real OS.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I think we're currently in a period of marketplace chaos, and when the dust settles we'll find that a $1000 PC in a tower case seems about as archaic as a radio in a wooden case the size of a washing machine.
The biggest computer manufacturers are still selling machines in the $1000 price range. If you look inside, you'll see that these machines are typically mostly air inside. They could have been put in a package the size of a hardcover book, but consumers associate the big case with a powerful machine. Part of the reason these machines cost so much is profit-taking by the manufacturers, and part of it is the artificial impetus to get insanely powerful hardware, because software like Vista and OOo is coded so inefficiently. This whole setup is a house of cards, though. People don't need the equivalent of a 1990 supercomputer in order to send email and do their word-processing.
The trouble is that although a lot of small manufacturers have been testing the waters with lower-priced machines, the big ones haven't been interested. This is partly analogous to compact cars versus SUVs -- the profit margin on an SUV can be as much as $15,000, whereas the profit margin on a Ford Focus might be under $1000. Even if there's demand for the Focus, Ford has been more interested in pushing the SUV, because that's where the profit was. Then you have Apple selling a tightly integrated package of hardware and software, which people are willing to pay big premiums for. There's also the Windows tax, which hides the vast differences in hardware cost between a bleeding edge machine and something with lower specs.
For a long time, the only low-cost PCs I was ever able to find in retail outlets were the Great Quality PCs sold at Fry's, which came with Linux preinstalled. They were wonderful machines, and I still have a bunch of them in a lab at school, working great. They sold for about $200. However, Fry's stopped carrying them about a year ago. Apparently the high rate of returns was eliminating their profit margin. A lot of users were buying them to put pirated copies of Windows on, and then if they had a problem with the install, they'd return the machine.
There's also the Everex gPC. I own one, and reviewed it. Perfectly reasonable hardware, although the linux distro they put on it was junk. Judging from the customer feedback on WalMart's site, they've been some of the same problems as Great Quality with keeping their gPC customers satisfied -- a lot of people buying them apparently don't understand that the machine they're buying doesn't do Microsoft.
It's great to see something like the CherryPal come out. One interesting thing about it is that they're exploring the low end of the hardware specs that are necessary to run a web browser. This is conceivably a way for them to get around the low profit margins that have so far crippled investment in this end of the market. Here's a comparison of the specs of three cheap consumer linux boxes:
The Linksys v. 4 router cost something like $50 when it was available. (Later versions downgraded the specs and used a different OS instead of Linux.) Let's estimate what it would have cost today to upgrade its specs to something more like a desktop system (assuming it had been an upgradable system, which it wasn't). Paying retail today it would cost me $45 for a 1.8 GHz celeron cpu, $23 for 512 MB of ram, and $15 for a 4 GB keychain drive. Adding that on to the $50 retail price of the router, you get $133. Of course a computer manufacturer wouldn't be paying anything like these retail prices for the parts, so this is really a vast overestimate of what it would cost to manufacture a system like the CherryPal. I suspect their manufacturing price is more like $50.
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While having it included would be nice, you are pretending that bus powered hubs are the only usb hubs there aren't. USB hubs with an outside power source aren't even more expensive than the bus powered hubs and can run pretty much any usb device without the complications that arise from using passive hubs.
This same old tired idea keeps popping up over and over again with a change of buzzwords. Now it's the cloud, before it was the network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_computer) and there was the Audrey in between.
However, the latency is always there and _your_ data is always elsewhere. Two very problematic issues that will always doom these efforts.
Oh yeah, it'll be a pain to replace the "all firefox" interface with a more familiar linux desktop as you'll have to do the installation over the wire.
Because that's *exactly* what their target market wants to do.
The issue here is that the machine can do *most* if not all of what your average joe wants in a computer.
Email, IM, web browsing, music, all in a low-powered device.
2-5W versus 100W+.
"Just Enough" computing was the motto of a similar project I worked on a year or so ago. Unfortunately there were some hardware limitations that really screwed that over. Fortunately all I'd invested was time.
The CherryPal, while being essentially the same hardware I worked with before, has eliminated most if not all the bottlenecks we had before (judging by the system specs).
I'm wary of the whole "cloud" aspect of it, but we'll see how well that works once their "brand angels" start filling the blogosphere. I've spoken to some actually, and I know that they have rather unrealistic expectation of the device. It'll be interesting to hear what they say when they're trying to push it WAY beyond what it was intended to do, and then fail because they don't understand what they're working with.