Why Eee?

[Giles Orr]

The latest Walmart flyer I received has an ad for an Acer laptop:
15.4" widescreen, 1 Gb RAM, 80 Gb HD and $398.88.  I couldn't find it
on their website.  Processor and optical drive unstated, but I imagine
it has both :-) .  It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic.  The point
is, despite obvious(?) deficiencies (probably a Celeron processor - or
AMD if you're lucky, but it must run at over 1 GHz) and a
substantially greater weight, the price is the same as the Eee and the
horsepower and screen are hugely better.  I think the Eee, the OLPC,
and the now defunct Classmate can take the credit for bringing us
laptops this cheap, but I would prefer this Acer over one of them,
even if I had to discard Vista and install Linux myself.  If the Eee
had hit their original target price of $200 we would have had a
different battle - but they didn't.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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