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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."
http://www.pledgebank.com/
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.
Democrat delenda est
Yeah, but how many /.errs have a Beowulf cluster of friends?
Ezekiel 23:20
The article doesn't mention a VGA port but at that price I'd be amazed if it has one.
Be amazed!!! There's a picture of the ports on the pruchase site (linked to from the artcle) and the specs and yes, one of the ports is external VGA.
who needs friends when you got a cluster of 100 laptops!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Extra dodgy.
The website for Carapelli Ltd. (the supplier) is blank, the street address is a P.O. Box, although they list phone (886-2-25969225) and fax numbers (886-2-25941330) which may be active.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
My Beowulf cluster is my friend. Does that count?
With specs like that. It's pretty much useless.
That's what she said.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Even closer in spirit, I think, would be www.eswarm.com. I've met one of the founders, and they've been in development for a long time, it seems. From what I understand, the whole point of e-swarming is to post something you'd like a discount on (like these cheap laptops, or even regular consumer items--blenders, ipods, car insurance, etc--and see if you can find the requisite number of people to affect a bulk buy discount.
When I first met the guy, and heard his idea, I thought it a brilliant use of the internet, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on before.
I was with you right up until you re-installed ME. Turn in your geek card. Now.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Actually you can buy the same ones from Bestlink. They give bulk discounts too, but you don't have to buy in bulk from them.
The manufacturer of these notebooks keeps slapping on different labels, but they're all pretty much the same, except for some minor aesthetic and firmware differences.
I've compared one of them (from yet another reseller, with yet another unknown brand slapped on the back) to my EeePC 701 and here's what I found:
Pros:
- Cheaper then the Eee
- Smaller and lighter, even when compared with the 701
- Screen is very bright, even with the Eee at its brightest, the el cheapo is still brighter, see picture)
Cons:
- No onboard wlan although it comes with a usb wlan device
- 400MHz mipsel as opposed to a 600 or 900MHz IA32 CPU in the Eee's
- No frozen bubble (???)
128 Megs of ram is useless. I am speaking from incompetence.
Fixed that for ya.
To be fair, most people don't have the specialized competence needed to run a computer properly.
Most people in the affluent West are just consumers. Typically they can't tune their own cars, heat their own homes or hunt their own food either. In the worst cases, some people haven't been educated to do anything more useful than consume corn syrup and TV shows... they are like big ol' plants.
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.