If you don't need Windows or the mobility, a Raspberry PI 2 may be an alternative. They are about $35 plus tax and the model 2 is as capable as a five year old Laptop.
I've never used one, but I'm surprised at the apparent gap between such suggestions and the lack of availability of such devices.
I mean, if a Pi can run perfectly well for $35, where's the place where you can just go and get a ready-to-go PC for under $50, BYO salvaged peripherals? It doesn't quite seem to make sense? PC/mobile manufacturing is so competitive.
There are plenty of competitors in the $150-$250 netbook/chromebook market. Not to mention things like the Intel Compute Stick and its competitors like the MK802. Not to mention tablets and phones.
A raspberry pi might only cost $35, but don't forget you'll need an SD card, and a power supply, and a case, and a wifi dongle, and a keyboard, and a mouse, and a monitor, and HDMI and power cables, and maybe a powered USB hub.
You really don't need a case. No wifi either, if the desk isn't too far from the cable/telephone box. Spare power supplies, keyboards and mice probably aren't hard to find either. But yeah, it's more than 35$ in most cases.
Once you add the bare minimums you need to make a RasperryPI a basic PC (power, case, wifi, storage etc) then you're probably pushing at least $100 and you're going to have a hard time making money selling them for less than $150-200. And at that price point there already are a number of players
Exactly. The rpi2 makes perfect sense if you are already a techy and have all those bits lying around and are happy enough making a cardboard case (which I am). For the consumer it's not packaged well enough.
I don't think that's true anymore. Not in a world where a 4 person house has 4 smart-phones, 2 tablets, etc. Not when the device costs $50 (assuming you can get peripherals free).
For $50 you can take some risk. It can't be a huge learning curve but it doesn't need to do everything you need a computer to do for the next 4 years, which was the paradigm that lead to Windows dominance. IE, if I'm buying a PC in 2002, the cost is serious and I need to get years out of it. I can't risk it sucking. For $50 the risk is on par with a pair of jeans. Sometimes you wear them all the time. Sometimes you don't like the,
The most obvious paths seems to me to give Google some competition in their Chrome OS market. Pi, Ubuntu, Mozilla. Tablets are great, but I think a significant part of the froth is just a side effect of (A) A fresh start on UI paradigms and backwards compatibility debt and (B) Price.
It's just a different kind of decision when the price is as low as it can be today.
To sell the Chromebook idea, Google had to address the XY problem for productivity applications. People will say "I need Office" because they want a spreadsheet and a word processor. By simply making people aware of their apps, Google was able to get many people to forgo the "Office XY" problem [And the iPhone XY problem via Android].
Apple and Microsoft ingrained a lot of intellectual shortcuts in regard to the way people in the mainstream think about computing in their quests for market share. So of course has Google. In fairness, these abstractions simplify the daunting complexity of deciding among a vast domain of computing options.
Recently, I've been thinking about how weird this is. By which I mean that many of the same people who would balk at Linux because it's not Windows wouldn't balk at a Mac and don't balk at Android instead of an iPhone.
