antirez weblog

When I saw the 100$ laptop...

My first thoughts was cool! this is going to be a huge hit in the developed countries, apart from its future about a cheap laptop for childrens in poor countries.

The low price and the big portability, the native support for wifi stimulated my dreams about this little computers that were almost as easy to carry around as cellular phones but much more usable, with a fairly big screen and a real keyboard. The low cost and the fact that in many cities there are a lot of open wifi around meant that everybody in principle could have a computer and be connected, everywhere. Every student can afford to buy a 300$ (this was the planned price if I remember correctly to buy the 100$ PC if you lived in developed countries) that let him to surf the web, chat with people and so on.

The EEEpc

Compared to the EEEpc, tha OLPC (One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, is the real name of the informally known as 100$ PC) was not so cool even if equally priced, this was due to the fact that the price of the OLPC in the developed countries had to buy laptops for free to poor childrens. Because the EEEpc instead is a pure for profit thing it offers an impressive set of features, like a decent 900Mhz Celeron CPU, 512Mb of RAM, 3 usb ports, a nice integrated webcam that is much better than many cheap webcams you can find around, and many other interesting features.

Still the real question is not just about price and portability, but: we really need a laptop that's so little at the point that the keyboard is a bit uncomfortable before a bit of training? After all there are already full featured laptops with great screens and keyboards, while more expansive and more weight they are after all just better in every other point of view. Still I and a lot of people already holding this cool laptops purchased the EEEpc, and for a good reason.

Normal 15.4" laptops are actually just trasportable computers

The real problem is that we are humans driving cars, taking flights, walking kilometers for streets to move from one point of the city to another one, so even a factor of two about size and weight will do a lot of difference, at the point that after I experimented for some day the EEEpc I'm not going to think at my Toshiba laptop as a portable computer anymore: it is actually just a transportable computer.

Indoor portability

What I mean is that actually even if we don't consider that to carry 2,5 Kg of weight around is not exactly cool (the EEEpc weights 0,9 Kg battery included instead, without to consider that the transformer is much light than a laptop transformer) old laptops don't have enough indoor portability.

The lack of indoor portability is evident if you look at people in airports with computers on their legs, or when you need to move in another room and take your standard laptop with you. It is simply not an object you can carry around without problems like you do with a cellular phone. The EEEpc instead is the kind of object you can really carry around without problems, without additional hardware since everything is really important is there and the computer itself is designed to work well without the need of accessories.

And yes... this makes a lot of difference and we should consider the EEEpc a new set of devices, not just small cheap class B laptops.