The disposable laptop computer is finally here: IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpads are $600 with 3/4 GB of RAM, wireless networking, and a 14″ display. I’ve always liked the Thinkpads because of the TrackPoint, the little red button in the middle of the keyboard, which I find much easier to use than the trackpads standard on most other laptops. Thinkpads are also remarkably resistant to dropping and other abuse. The only thing that one could say against this configuration is that it doesn’t include a CD/DVD burner. So the price of a decent laptop is now converging with the price of an expensive cell phone. I wrote about this possibility about one year ago: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/09/09. Will people still want to pay $1000+ for a laptop that they will have to guard from theft and impact when they could just buy a Thinkpad for $600 now and replace it two years from now for $450?
22 thoughts on “The disposable laptop”
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And I can’t wait until Apple matches it with their own little version of a throw-away laptop . . . maybe they could call it a “Crab Apple”
Talking about cheap laptops:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8973616/
Personally I still want at least a 15″ screen, ideally with 1600×1200, and that still ain’t cheap.
Incredible. Notice also that you can add Microsoft Office for $122 (sans PowerPoint), which blows my mind.
I am not holding my breath on an Apple equivalent. Today’s iMac starts at the same price as the original, $1300, despite seven years of cost cutting in the computer sector. And the benefits of the operating system over Windows are too minor to pay $700 more than a low end Dell and a flat panel.
(I use Mac OS X all day at work and owned only Macs from age 15-25, when I switched to Windows 2000 at home. That five-year-old Dell Windows box still runs at a speedy clip.)
On the planet that I live on, a $600 item is not considered disposable.
What color is the sky on the planet you live on? I’m guessing green. 🙂
Spending less money on a Windows computer saves money only if you consider your time to be valueless. I say this advisedly, as I observed about a third of the people I work with today attempting to recover from the latest Windows worm. Well, actually they have recovered, but it cost them the morning. In the future things may be different, but at the moment the extra money spent on a Mac actually buys you something.
Will: Agreed that $600 is not spare change. But dropping a $600 object into a puddle is a lot less painful than dropping a $1500 object. If you assume that the average laptop gets stolen or badly damaged every 4-5 years keeping a replacement stream going becomes a $150 annual expense.
George: It might be nice to have an operating system so unpopular it wasn’t being targeted by viruses but the consequence is that it is also so unpopular that there isn’t any software for it unless your needs are 100 percent mainstream. If you enjoy flying airplanes, for example, you’ll want software to help with flight planning and software/hardware to update the avionics databases. All of this stuff is Windows-only (and the folks who’ve tried using it with the Windows emulators on Mac OS X were unsuccessful (and isn’t the Windows emulator for the Mac about the same price as a complete Windows computer?)).
As far as Windows sysadmin time goes I personally haven’t ever experienced a problem with a virus on any of my WinNT, Win2000, or WinXP machines. Generally I set them up and walk away for 3-4 years. My main complaint with Windows sysadmin is that it is hard to transfer all of one’s licensed software, with serial numbers and so forth, from one PC to another. I would buy new computers more frequently if I didn’t have to reinstall everything.
George: I don’t have a lot of experience with Macs, but I too have had great success with the more recent NT-based versions of Windows. I’m sure there are people out there who are wrestling with crashes every day or two on Windows PCs, but I certainly don’t think that’s anything like the standard Windows experience these days. I’m on a PC for eight to ten hours a day and half that on weekends, and I never, ever experience BSODs.
My Windows 2000 box has always been behind a Linksys router, which seems to have spared me from the worms. I also don’t open strange emails or attachments. The only spyware I ever had was from downloading a file sharing app, which I have since uninstalled (then cleaned with a free antispyware program).
It’s funny, people talk about Windows users the way they talk about Perl programmers. There are so darn many of them, it’s easy to find people who are really getting themselves in trouble and doing things all wrong.
Ryan: (1) You can get a Mac Mini for $499. (2) Due to “seven years of cost cutting in the computer sector” today’s iMac for $1300 has *vastly* better specs than the original, including a 17″ flat panel display.
Seems a common thread amoungst Mac users is the need to poke fun the obviously weak (but certainly most targeted,) security of Windows. I just bought a new desktop PC mainly MAC did not offer performance RAID disks. A similar Mac G5 system was $2000 MORE than this RAID driven Dell. Software costs were another factor in not going Mac. No regrets.
All of our development team use Macs now. Paul Graham wrote an insightful article about the Return of the Mac (http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html).
I had some problems with Win XP (prior to SP2), but more important is all the non-computer people (like my whole hockey team) that all complain about their computer freezing up and unrequested popups that appear when they don’t even press a key, etc… …my wife’s machine was frequently compromised despite my frequent admonitions about attachments, etc…. Life got a lot simpler in my household when we switched to Macs.
And Philip, your charge that “It might be nice to have an operating system so unpopular it wasn’t being targeted by viruses” is so off the mark, as given the snootiness of Mac fanbois, it’s not just that it’s unpopular, but being *nix based that locks out a whole lot of crap that Windows is susceptible to (though Win is closing in on that, especially in corporate realm, but to disasterous side effects – i.e., developers not being able to run Oracle on their box and open ticket to sysadmin group). For an intelligent guy, you sure are quick to embrace cliche type thinking…
$600 is not considered “disposable” IMV…
Granted you have special software needs (your flying needs), but not all of us are blessed to be internet millionaires trotting around the globe, spending globs of time in exotic locales…
Cease and desist the evangelism, fellow Mac users. It’s unwelcome, and you’re blowing our cover. Keep your head down and let the peecees continue taking the bullets for us.
Naum: If $600 isn’t “disposable” then all the more reason to save money by buying standard PC hardware and running Windows or GNU/Linux! My particular interest happens to be flying and the Mac is useless in that arena. But that doesn’t mean that only pilots need Windows. Any given person is going to have one unusual interest that is supported by Windows-only software. For teenagers it is probably some sort of game (most games as I understand it are Windows-only). For an adult it might be wanting to subscribe to the $5/month unlimited Yahoo! Music service (Windows only). I’m all in favor of people being ridiculously rich and having enough money to give Steve Jobs $2000 after they’ve bought their required WinXP machine. I’m just not one of them!
I use Apple computers at home, and Windows XP at work. I like Apple hardware, and OS X. I like OS X for the Unix-esque attributes, and for the spiffy GUI, and for the good hardware support. I’d be happy using GNU/Linux, but I prefer OS X. If someone prefers GNU, or Windows, that’s fine, just so long as they have an educated preference. I think most Windows users think Windows is the best because it’s the most popular (not always a good assumption). I personally have no Windows-only needs at home, and don’t mind spending the extra money every few years to get the product I want.
Although a $600 IBM laptop running GNU/Linux does sound rather enticing. 🙂
Phil: Yeah. I work in the avionics software industry. I’m involved with avionics simulation software, which runs exclusively on Windows. It was originally built for VMS. There has been talk of porting it to GNU/Linux, as there has been growing interest in that platform among some of our users, but nothing definite yet. Windows XP has been surprisingly stable, but it would be nice to get better real-time control of the system. (Hence I do not believe that Windows XP is the best platform for our particular software, at least not for the developers…)
For the record, if you don’t like or want windoze (and who can blame you for that?), the IBM laptop probably runs Linux quite nicely. That’s certainly what I’d do with one.
HP has the little pointing stick, too.
Why would you want to play games on a $600 laptop? I agree that this is making the average consumer’s life easier, but there are many of us who need the more expensive&better laptops (and I don’t use macs due to performance issues). To get the $600 laptop to last 4-5 years, particularly if you’re prone to dropping things, is quite wishful thinking. I think that a lot of this boils down to that not all people tend to drop and generally abuse their stuff, which makes disposability less of an issue 🙂 (also, how about environmentalism? piling up huge amounts of computer junk is not exactly ecological)
Do these low-end Lenovo Thinkpads support dual-displays? I’m looking for a cheap (erm, inexpensive) laptop to take on the road and give presentations. I’d prefer a laptop that can display the “slideshow” on an external monitor/projector while showing a “presenter’s screen” on the built-in LCD display. Can I do that with the $600 Lenovo? — Thanks… Chris
Slightly off topic, but are there any laptops with ergonomic keyboards? There used to be one by Samsung years ago that sort of split the keyboard to angle it outward, but I haven’t see anything recently. Anyone?
Why buy a laptop with a built-in ergo keyboard? Laptops, by nature, are ergonomically evil — if you place the keyboard in the correct position the monitor is in your lap, and if you place the monitor in the correct position your hands are raised in front of you like Frankenstein’s monster. Changing the design of the built-in keyboard doesn’t help to solve this more fundamental problem — but it does make the keyboard more fragile and expensive. I just use external ergonomic keyboards, one at work and one at home.
I really hope before computer manufacturers start calling their products “disposable” that they start creating machines that are environmentally friendly and biodegradable. The last thing we need are businesses buying thousands of these and dumping them a year later.