More Confirmation That The World Wants Small Cheap Computers, If You Need It at Robert Pogson

When I shop for anything I look for price/performance. That’s why I waited weeks to receive a “four-way” switch at a reasonable price. That’s why I buy vegetables at harvest time when price is lowest. My freezer is full of them. Scarcely room for a deer…

Wintel is anxious that the price of computers stay high in spite of Moore’s Law and corollaries. They want the monopoly to live on. One potential solution to their problem is to “upsell” by adding features that seem desirable to some. An upselling campaign that started a few years ago was the idea of the ultrabook, you know, the netbook perfected… At the time Wintel was worried about GNU/Linux on small cheap notebooks so M$ forbade OEMs to install that other OS on large cheap notebooks and promoted the “ultrabook” which would seem to perform better and might sell at a higher price. Well, the ultrabooks are here and they’re not selling.

According to Digitimes, suppliers of ultrabooks have cut back orders 40%. What a disappointment for those who assume buyers are stupid and easily manipulated.

If your CPU is idling do you need a more powerful CPU? Draining your battery faster? If you’re digging a hole should you dig faster, trying to get out?
Is thinner and lighter any advantage over a netbook?
Are you willing to pay $1000+ for less
Do you look for the most expensive item when shopping?

I didn’t think so. Most people are somewhat like me. They worked hard for their money and want suppliers to work hard for theirs. The world does not owe M$ a living and should not buy over-priced systems. Look at price/performance and don’t count feature-bloat as a feature unless it’s something you really need.

Come to think of it, consider the OS when you shop. Should you pay $hundreds or so for something you can get for $0? I don’t think so. I suggest Debian GNU/Linux. It’s Free Software and it’s $0.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

1 Response to “More Confirmation That The World Wants Small Cheap Computers, If You Need It”

Feed for this Entry

1 RealIT Nov 10th, 2011 at 2:00 pm

You MUST be a paid Debian $hill.

I highly recommend Windows 7 Ultimate and Office 2010 Professional for all your needs. If you are a command line warrior, Powershell is FAR FAR superior to bash. No more will you only just have Cat, Grep, Top and LS like Linux.

Get-Windows | ? {$_.Pogson -eq “Delusional”} | Format-Partition -overwrite Linux. See it’s that easy!

What the Debian $hill didn’t tell you is that there is no support for Linux, no drivers, no decent applications and for $0 you get exactly nothing. Not even a pleasing looking GUI.