Leaked Pics of CrunchPad Elicit Progress Update

TechCrunch has released a few more technical details, pictures, and general comments about their CrunchPad project as a recent accidental leak saw a new round of images posted to the web. It seems that the tablet has continued to grow and evolve with the help of an Intel Atom chip (as opposed to the Via chip previously used), new software from Fusion Garage, and a bottom-up Linux install. "I wanted something I couldn't buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined. The goal — a very thin and light touch screen computer, sans physical keyboard, that has no hard drive and boots directly to a browser to surf the web. The operating system exists solely to handle the hardware drivers and run the browser and associated applications. That's it."

Comments

Kinda reminds me of a Chumby

[mdm-adph]

http://www.chumby.com/

I like the philosophy behind the Chumby, but if the CrunchPad is cheaper, I'd get that.

Re:Kinda reminds me of a Chumby

[SectoidRandom]

Read a little further along the article for your answer;

Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business.

Re:Kinda reminds me of a Chumby

[agristin]

Read a little further along the article for your answer;

Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business.

I'd like to see that business plan. I suspect if you build it at 250$ the least you could sell it for and not go out of business is 500$. That might be normal.

83% cost of manufacture? At a price point of a few hundred dollars, it is almost impossible to break even, much less turn a profit.

You could survive 80%+ cost of manufacture if you had a very low price point (1$ or less), had no support or return costs, and very low advertising and could sell millions or billions of them. Even then you would want to get down to 50% or less.

Re:Kinda reminds me of a Chumby

[ConanG]

The thing is, this isn't a normal business venture. He mostly wants it to be built because he wants one himself. He's not motivated by profit, but desire to realize the product. A lot of the initial work was done openly by volunteers which drastically cut engineering costs. I don't think there's going to be much of an advertising budget.

My guess is that he's done the math and probably has a better idea of what he can sell it for and not go out of business. Note that: NOT GO OUT OF BUSINESS. Not become a millionaire. Not become a business tycoon. Simply stay afloat. I think that's all he really wants.

Re:Cost $250 Retail for $300?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no business to be built on $50 profit. Let's imagine they go direct for now. No resellers at all. When a single machine is returned, that's $250 out of the businesses pocket. It would take 10 sold machines to recoup the cost of the single return!

If a machine is returned, unless something is broken, they can refurbish and resell it.

But even if the returned machine is a complete loss (and I wonder why you'd refund someone who broke it), its cost of 250$ divided by 50$ profit per unit is five units, not ten.

But yeah, that's not much profit. If it costs 250$, sell it for nearly 500$.

Re:wait... what?

[rickb928]

I had an iOpener, a V5 that I got a hard drive onto, split the keyboard connector for a mouse, added a low profile fan to keep it from smoking, and loaded XP (or was it 98, so long ago) to replace the custom QNX install. Explaing the pizza key got tired. A USB Ethernet dongle got me online. woot!

But you could buy one for $99, 'forget' to use a credit card, and never log into the service that was supposed to subsidize the device. They show up on eBay sometimes now, but it ain't a touchscreen.

I actually wish I still had one. But a CrunchPad sounds like what I would love to have. So long as it can handle Flash... grrr...

Wish someone would come out with similar hardware that was subsidized by their service. Be fun to hack up again...