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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."
I seem to remember there being such things in the first web bubble... net appliances they were called, souped-down computers used for just browsing the web.
I seem to recall the hackers and linux users working hard to get them to be MORE than just browsers and work more like a real computer. I also recall them failing miserably in the market.
Sometimes I begin to think that people just don't know what they want.
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For $250, this would make a great peripheral for a full-fledged computer. If the host computer could use it as an external display AND touch input device, I think that would make for some more interesting possibilities than a standalone device with an underpowered CPU and a mediocre OS/apps.
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It's too big. Cut the size in half and add mobile broadband options in addition to wifi. Otherwise it should be good.
It's essentially a PADD from Star Trek, and once someone figures out that copying that design will result in huge profits, we'll see some really cool gear.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
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.