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"World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only
BobB writes to tell us that what one company is calling the "world's cheapest laptop" is now available at the price of $130. Unfortunately if you want to buy one you will also need to convince 99 of your closest friends to go in on an order with you since you cannot buy in less than units of 100. We have covered several "cheap laptops" in the past and many have turned out to be fraudulent, so especially with a large up-front cost, buyer beware. "The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software."
...who's in?
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With specs like that. It's pretty much useless.
If useful to you means "can play the latest FPS video games", then yes, it's useless.
Seriously. Just click around on that website. Looks like China is about to unleash a crapload of cheap laptops. I said it back when the EEEPC refocused on the $400-$600 market, that at those prices Linux was going to get replaced with XP and I was mostly right. But I also said somebody would remember the hugh interest when Asus mentioned a $200 pricepoint and that somebody would fill it. Consider it filled.
Most of these are very poorly thought out designs, especially today's link. Most will fail in the marketplace, only a few will even get into mass retail channels as even the morons at Best Buy can smell the fail. But all it takes is for ONE to succeed and that will probably happen. When that happens everything changes.
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As this liliputing article points out, this is a rebrand of a common product (razorbook, elonex one, etc.).
The linux distribution is, well, unknown, and the specs are less than impressive; basically it's a MIPS32 CPU, PDA rather than laptop range. Liliputing also has a $99 laptop on their homepage right now, with even less impressive specs.
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You can browse, run most OpenOffice products at a useable speed (and all of them if you don't mind some lag). And use connection software to tunnel into your work machine from outside the office. And use chat software. What more do you want with a mobile machine?
I was just looking at the minimum specs for running Flash version 9 http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ which apparently needs a P2-450 to run. I'm curious if this 400 MHz CPU would be fast enough for smooth playability? Lack of Flash support would eliminate a good chunk of uses for this thing.
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At around $100, a laptop becomes an impulse buy for many people. Need a disposable machine you can buy for an overseas vacation? Need something you can give the kids where you don't have to worry if it gets lost or trashed? Need a laptop you can buy from a vending machine? How about handing out free laptops that tie you into some monthly subscription service? All of these become possible at a $100 price point.
Despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Linux is going to dominate the low end of laptop computing within three years. Microsoft will have to give away Windows in order to compete, and that ain't gonna happen. If the low-end manufacturers can standardize on a particular Linux distro/interface, the revolution will happen that much faster. Then, once everyone is used to operating these cut-rate machines, some enterprising vendors will need only package "deluxe" versions of the same Linux distro along with support for pricier laptops, and Windows will start to see some serious market erosion.
FPS video games?
Just look at those specs, man. 128Mb of RAM, 400Mhz CPU. There's a shitload a person [b]can't[/b] reasonably do with that machine without obscene amounts of disk thrashing (assuming it even has a disk):
- Use KDE, GNOME, or anything else approaching a modern DE (XFCE is even questionable)
- Use Firefox
- Use Konqueror
- -Maybe- use Opera
- Run Open Office and anything else
128Mb of RAM was constraining and tight in Linux as early as 2002 or so, even with Debian. Today, I think you'd be pretty much restrained to using an embedded linux platform - and even then, you'd still not be able to get 'mainstream' versions of popular applications to run fully due to the RAm limitations.
If they'd charged $30 more and put 512Mb in there, it'd be a LOT more reasonable, and still the cheapest thing available, anywhere.
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Yes, but these ultra-cheap laptops are going to make a huge impact in first-world countries, not just in the developing world. Sure, Microsoft may practically give away Windows to an African customer, but not to customers in Europe or North America. People in the U.S. alone will buy millions of these laptops, and Microsoft cannot maintain first-world profit margins with third-world pricing. Who is going to pay for a $200, or even $50, for an operating system on a $100 computer?
Microsoft can't win this battle in developed countries, because the price of the hardware puts a ceiling on the price they can charge on their software. Either Windows drops to $10 a license, or Microsoft concedes the low end of the market to Linux. And once that happens, Linux will start eating its way up the price-point ladder.