The one creation of M$, bundling the OS with the PC, is getting tired. Prices are so low that it’s hard to hide a few dollars for the OS in a box. M$ wants to charge something like $50 to the OEM for the privilege of selling a licence for the OS. The OEM then charges more than that to the retailer who does a similar markup to deliver the OS for more than $100 to the consumer. That does not work very well when the price of the box is ~$100.
The solution? Bundle the bundled OS with a bundle of other products: monitor, printer etc. so that the price of the OS does not stick out much. The result is that Walmart is pushing back-to-school specials at very attractive prices if you want a complete set. Here’s an example, Lenovo M58 mini PC bundled with monitor, keyboard, mouse and inkjet printer for $367. Imagine what the price would be with GNU/Linux on that box… Imagine how much M$ must be discounting the licence for this to be possible. Tigerdirect does not even advertise the price of M58 alone (sold only in stores) … Walmart does sell the box alone for $258 so the price of the hardware is about ~$158 and the OS ~$100. Lenovo no longer sells it so this is a clearance item typically selling for half-price. Walmart is desperately trying to make that other OS work on small cheap computers. Good luck.
In Brazil, Walmart advertises two very similar PCs. One comes with that other OS. The other comes with an 18.5 inch monitor and GNU/Linux and the one with GNU/Linux is still cheaper, about $50 cheaper.
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206
3
2
23894 
11852 
11704 
4628 
4259 
1641 
198 
14 
2 
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Imagine what the price would be with GNU/Linux on that box…
It wouldn’t exist, Mr. Pogson. You know nothing at all about price pointing for retail products. They are not priced by the OEMs based on some combination of costs of components, rather they pick price points based on market studies and then try to fill the perceived need at that price point with something that generates a profit.
There is no perceived market for a Linux based PC at Walmart in the USA, so there is no product at any price. It would be stupid for Walmart to do that and Lenovo doesn’t offer any combination that they know the distribution chain will not want to offer.
Clarence Moon wrote, “There is no perceived market for a Linux based PC at Walmart in the USA” even though ASUS and several other companies make a good living selling GNU/Linux PCs in USA. ASUS sold out and could not keep up with demand. Dell plans to do the same.
Oh, and Walmart.com lists two GNU/Linux PCs: Acer and Acer
At $238 they qualify as small cheap computers. With Atoms and 2gB of RAM they can do a lot. They must perceive there is a market even if Clarence does not.
Clarence wrote:
“There is no perceived market for a Linux based PC at Walmart in the USA…” because it’s 1995 stupid!
ASUS “sold out” because they made very few of them in the first place. Only a limited run.
Atoms and 2Gb of RAM are barely OK for simple web surfing. A toy computer only.
ASUS doubled and redoubled the output of eeePCs with GNU/Linux. They sold out just about everywhere and people waited weeks to get their machines.
Tar wrote, “Atoms and 2Gb of RAM are barely OK for simple web surfing. A toy computer only.”
Nonsense. I have three Atoms running GNU/Linux in my home usually for visitors. They all think they are pretty snappy. Think of it. A few years ago 32bit single-core could run all the software for 30 users in my computer lab at 1.8gHz clock. These Atoms have two and four 64-bit cores at 1.6 gHz and the systems in my home are for single users although I can run stuff on them by SSH and X remotely. They have 1gB and 1.5gB RAM and no one runs out.
One thing Mr. Pogson let slip through: The Linux machine has double the ram memory and still, it is cheaper than the other OS one…
“Atoms and 2Gb of RAM are barely OK for simple web surfing. A toy computer only.”
True enough as I can attest with a ASUS eee loaded with WinXP as sold.
A whole ‘nother matter when wiped over with UNR 10.04 (GNU/Linux); then I’ve found its a quite capable little workhorse, can run LibreOffice, Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, Maxima and other heavy stuff….
ASUS and several other companies make a good living selling GNU/Linux
And that is why they are not in stores? A rather feeble attempt at levity, Mr. Pogson!
They sold out just about everywhere …
Is that why they quit making them? Too much hassle to keep restocking the stores?
Face the facts, Mr. Pogson. No one wanted them once a Windows version was available and they fell by the wayside. As to “sold out”, you yourself linked to a a place (Alibaba?) that was offering them at fire sale pricing a while back.
Tar I am not a light user. Not by any idea of light.
KDE is my default GUI. That alone makes 300 megs disappear. But 2 G is workable. Yes my current system has 8G but I do have a 1 G tablet that also runs KDE and other stuff on arm. So 1 G is big enough to run the heavies WM at the movement and LibreOffice.
Tar
“OK for simple web surfing.”
Webbrowser is where the problem comes in. As long as you don’t use firefox or have KSM turned on. Chrome until the firefox 15 comes out would be my recommendation to anyone with under 4G of ram so they do not get burnt because of there anti-virus and other plugins.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Firefox-15-reduces-memory-consumption-1649125.html
This is quite a major fix so closing tabs does infant give your memory back.
With KSM on it does not matter as much because running the same test with 150+ tabs as http://www.h-online.com did yes firefox running in wine on Linux so I could install the windows only site advister. At peak only consumed 300 megs compared to 1.4 to 1.7GB with KSM on. With KSM off it performed about the same as the graphic at h-online. Most of the leaks compress very well because they are duplicate data. With compression on being KSM if wine would run on my 1G of ram arm table it would work.
So if you cannot make a machine with 2G of ram productive something is wrong. Windows I can understand MS is not willing to pay VMWARE a patent license to use KSM tech so leaking applications eat more memory than they should. Yes MS wants everyone to pay them for using there patented tech yet does not go out and pay for the patents that would make user experience better.
Its in fact web surfing that kicks the systems nuts in mostly because Firefox and Internet explorer has some quite major memory leaks. New version of firefox address some of these.
Speaking of price points… I bought a Netgear Stora 2000 NAS enclosure yesterday. It has a 1GHz ARM cpu, 128Mb RAM, 256Mb flash with RedHat Linux on it, 2 HDD bays with mirroring and it costs about the same as a decent PSU: $72.
The next step would be moving all the media from our laptop to the NAS, and removing all the unnecessary internet access stuff installed by Netgear. Hopefully it will be next weekend : )))
Clarence Moon wrote, “Face the facts”, but does not state any facts. eeePCs with GNU/Linux did sell out globally and ASUS did not quit making them. I bought one a few years ago in the Arctic. eeePCs with GNU/Linux are in stores just not constipated retail stores in North America sucking up to M$.