When it comes to saying silly things, Mr. O, you never disappoint! The OS is not at all an “optional extra”. I guess your ignorance of things extends to buying cars in addition to civil and criminal laws, military organizations, political strategies, business decisions, and most other things. You can’t code either, but you do excel at using Google to find things that you seem to not understand!

But back to the analogy and your misrepresentations. The OS could be a choice, and often is, wherein a buyer can select Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, or Windows 7 Ultimate editions with the former usually being the base choice and the latter two options that may be selected at a higher price. Of course in the brick and mortar store world, units are preset with one or the other, usually the Home Premium version, and the choice is not made at the point of sale.

Periodically some OEM start-up or major OEM such as Dell will offer a Linux based package, usually as their low price leader and a minimal configuration. This is an effort to gather up the very bottom of the market where price-buying is about the only motivation. Mr. Pogson goes for this niche, I sense. But over the history of PCs, those lines have never been a success and all have been eventually abandoned. The few OEMs who have gone into business to serve the Linux fans have generally faltered and gone by the wayside. VALinux is the classic example.

But whether they are Linux or, much more commonly Windows 7, all the machines produced for the general market are powered with an OS. It may be a choice, as I said, but it is never an option.

Really we don’t know Clarence Moon. Might not be able todo it without Windows is more correct.

Now with Windows 8 change that home users can buy OEM licenses every where. There is now the possibility of at store imaging.

So the question is going forwards do we need Windows default installed. The answer is most likely not.

Lot of key market things have changed Clarence Moon.

Really computers should be like cars. You can skip the optional extras on cars. OS is an optional extra.

Nonsense. Rather than that, do the marketing. What is being sold? A laptop? No. Rather a “Windows Laptop”. You can’t do that without Windows.

Arm for basically the same level you would be looking at a 40 dollar spend in chips.

So 150 to 300 dollar notebooks should be possible in volume.

ch
–Ok, so let’s call it “bottom-end stuff”.–
You missed the clue. Intel is not bottom-end stuff.

Arm is bottom end stuff on price. If arm notebooks can take off things are going to get interesting.

If you don’t care about possible illegal copy of windows and viruses . Those $264.00 dollars laptops in china are $209-229 USD for same spec.

Walmart has down right cheep shipping since they own the ship. 264.00 with case there is room for 10 to 20 percent mark-up.

At some point entry level laptops are going to fall under 200 USD. 200 USD is not a nice place for Microsoft. When 300 USD was broken MS started doing starter editions. Then applying screen and memory limits to access them.

Intel is still producing Celerons so, no, it’s not about selling off old stuff.

have you looked at the specs of that notebook? It comes with a Celeron CPU, for crying out loud! While that $500 notebook surely has an Intel Core whatever. In other words, it’s just a matter of selling off old stuff at a price.

“Either OEMs or M$ are getting squeezed.”

Walmart’s business model is to squeeze almost everyone (primarily suppliers and staff) so they can sell cheap.

How much do you think it takes to make a big notebook? They cost ~$200 or more. That leaves M$ and the OEM dividing up ~$50. Do the maths. Either OEMs or M$ are getting squeezed. It could be both. I think after this quarter all OEMs will be looking for greener fields. Compare these prices for a year ago when $300 was the bottom of the barrel for desktops and $500 was common for notebooks. Even netbooks were selling for $250 recently. Selling a full-sized notebook for a similar price means someone earns less.

Meanwhile MS makes another $bn.