Netbook Return Rates Much Higher For Linux Than Windows

ivoras writes "An interview with MSI's director of US Sales, Andy Tung, contains this interesting snippet: "We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven't really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it's not what they are used to. They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.'"

Comments

Just like MS notebook

[fermion]

I would love to pay $2000 or less for a high performance laptop but I don't like the fact that I have to pay for Vista when Autodesk software prefers XP, the fact that every time I plug in a USB drive or a camera it wastes time trying to load a device driver rather than just mounting it as a generic external volume, that I have to run AVG, Adaware, and Spybot periodically to make sure that nothing nasty has gotten on the machine, and that the there is conflict in the Java system between MS and Sun, which means that sometimes some my visualization apps don't work. Not to mention general lack of a Firewire 800 port for my external hard disks. And that the cheaper machine is a little heavier and much bigger.

So, since I know what I need, I buy an Apple, add XP to it, and go on my merry way.

Re:they don't know what they get until they open t

[Overly Critical Guy]

How exactly is piracy ethically no different from mob looting a store whose locks were broken? Your analogy is missing something. Try "mob looting a store that has an infinite supply of something and pays nothing for it." You seem to be missing the specific points between theft and copyright infringement (there is a reason courts still don't call it theft). Media can be infinitely reproduced at no cost to the creator. Throws that whole supply and demand thing out of whack, doesn't it?

My sig is about the ethics of piracy, not the distribution costs. I purposely included the word "ethically" to avoid responses like yours. However, since you brought it up, why do Slashdotters insist that piracy isn't theft, yet when someone is violating the GPL, you guys call it "stolen code?"

Clearly, just because something can be digitally copied doesn't mean it has no value--it certainly has a lot of value to the person who created it to try to make a living, which pirates want to make sure doesn't happen by freeloading off their work.