[LINK] Linux diskless little green computers

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Wed Nov 7 15:34:48 AEDT 2007


I wrote on 6/11/07 10:08 AM:
> > ASUS Eee PC ... $US399 ...

The price on Amazon.com for these units suddenly went up to $US469.99 
within a few hours and then down to $429.99, so I suspect these are 
the first few units available being sold at a premium to early 
adopters for whatever they are willing to pay: 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Y33CVM?tag=asus-eee-pc-20>.

These type of diskless subnotebook PCs have not sold well in the past 
as consumer products and so despite ASUS' claims to the contrary I 
suspect they intend to mainly sell them in large batches to schools 
and universities. As an example RM are marketing them for school 
children in the UK. If you want to buy a few hundred then ASUS will 
probably talk to you, but not if you want just one. I was going to 
see if I could get one to try out for university student use, but I 
suspect the 7 inch screen will be too small.

At over $US400 they sound less of a bargain, but this would reflect a 
comparable price to a full size "proper" laptops. A mass market 
laptop costs just over $US600, so by the time you reduce the price a 
few hundred dollars for the Eee's slow processor, smaller screen and 
lack of a DVD drive, the price is about right. But compared to the 
other sub-sub-notebook PCs, for which a premium of up to a thousand 
dollars is charge, the Eee is cheap (assuming they actually are 
available and work as advertised).

I suspect we will now see a number of cut down desktop and laptop web 
appliance computers, made by simply using a lower power processor, 
less memory and peripherals and Linux in place of Microsoft Windows.

ps: I used a 7 inch screen diskless sub notebook Sphere/Zeos Palm Top 
PC, running MSDOS and Microsoft Works, to edit a loooong mail message 
from Roger Clarke containing a senate submission in 1994, in Europe. 
It was not easy to do <http://www.tomw.net.au/nt/tourist.html#paris>. 
Compared to the Eee PC, the Sphere/Zeos Palm Top PC had a very dim 
text only monochrome screen, clicky little keyboard, AA batteries, 
and only an RS-232 port for communications.
  ;-)




Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU  




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