Laptop Computers For $150? I’ll Believe It When I See It!
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There is an upstart computer company out of Atlanta, GA called Lite Appliances, Inc. that is saying it will have a laptop computer in 2007 that will cost only $150. According to a recent article, the laptop will not use any of the standard operating systems nor will it be using AMD or Intel processors.
This is what I find strange. Nowhere on the Lite Appliances, Inc. Web site is there any mention of this. Nor is there any press release available. Which makes one wonder where this information came from. Having read over the years about new innovations that will change our lives only to find that they were myths, one might forgive me for being a skeptic.
So my questions are these:
- How does anyone come up with a $150 laptop and still make a profit?
- If it is not using any standard operating systems, what is it using?
- No AMD or Intel Processors? What will it use and how well will it work?
- Is this going to be a toy or a fully functional laptop?
Here is the alleged press release. See what you think.
[tags]laptop $150, lite appliances, press release, skeptic, innovation[/tags]
One Comment
Jeff Dickey
December 22nd, 2006
at 6:13am
Not that hard - probably easier than in a desktop, since fewer variables to contend with:
* Use one of the inexpensive Asian 486/Pentium clone processors - or an embedded chip (Zilog Z8000, anyone?)
* Slower clock speed implies slower/cheaper memory, like what’s still used in embedded systems,
* Their press release doesn’t say “no mainstream OS”, it says “no Microsoft OS” (emphasis mine); that will certainly drop the price and increase reliability. What will ship will be some variant of BSD/*nix and/or a hitherto embedded-only OS
* Display will probably be a lower-res (maybe 800×600) display, again from an Asian clone chipmaker. Very low cost, but acceptable for an appliance-type system
And so on. If you assume a true appliance-class system (liited userland software installs/hardware upgrades), what the press release says to me is that it’s going to be an almost fixed-function appliance. Most people run a very limited number of applications; if you cover those with reasonable storage management, Grandma and your next-door neighbor are likely to have all they really need - certainly for the price.
If this succeeds - and having spent a third of my life in the Third World, I do hope it does - we’ll hopefully see the start of truly pervasive computer use. Most people in the world have never touched a PC; Microsoft junk is too expensive (witness the 90%+ piracy rate in huge chunks of the world - people aren’t naturally larcenous, but the percveived-value-for-money equation is so far out of whack for Southern Hemisphere people it isn’t funny). That sucking sound that you hear, louder than a jet engine outside your window, is lost productivity from people who just want to get stuff done, having to mess with security and spyware and viruses and such…. eliminating that will have a huge positive impact. Have the systems upgradable, even - just do it in a monolithic flash-type system, so nobody has to trip over details.
This could work - and hopefully it will spell the beginning of the true revolution in computing that the world has been promised for 30 years and more. Making snarky remarks against it just demonstrates your own biases.