Hope for inexpensive consumer PCs with Linux?
I previously posted about a $200 Linux PC at Wal-Mart. At the time, I expressed doubt that it would sell. I am glad to say that I was wrong since it seems that Wal-Mart has sold out the original shipment. That’s good news for those of us wishing for a low-cost consumer system. However, the news is not quite as good as it first sounds since Wal-Mart stocked only 10,000 units. Nonetheless, it encourages me to think that maybe there is hope for a consumer Linux machine. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes comments:
Now here’s what’s interesting about this PC. It doesn’t have what it takes to run Windows Vista, but it has more than enough power to do pretty much everything that users want from a PC. As hardware costs have plummeted, and the power that can be squeezed from components increased, the cost of having Windows installed on such a PC becomes too high a proportion of the cost of components. For example, if you wanted to load Windows Vista Home Basic onto this system (not that I’d suggest that you tried - the PC just couldn’t cope with Vista), you’re adding between $60 and $90 to the cost of the PC (depending on what the vendor pays for an OEM license, if you do it yourself, expect to pay the higher price in this spectrum). In fact, Wal-Mart do sell a similar system with Home Basic pre-installed (this system has an extra 512MB of RAM, a SATA 150 drive instead of an ATA 150 hard drive, and comes with a keyboard and mouse) for $298. Add Microsoft Office to that cost and the price of software doubles the price of the hardware. By installing Linux and OpenOffice, the total cost of the PC is kept as low as possible. While the price of hardware has fallen dramatically, the price of Windows hasn’t. This could be Microsoft’s Achilles’ Heel. This low price point will appeal to many.
I make particular note of the last four sentences in the comment above.
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