Geekfoolery

Taiwan-based computer maker Asus has just announced that by the end of the year, they’ll deliver a laptop computer to world markets with a retail cost of $189.

This announcement puts Asus at the head of the pack of a number of other companies and projects that have been looking to produce a cheap, functional laptop computer, the most notable being the One Laptop Per Child project, whose goal was to produce a hundred dollar laptop for kids in developing countries. Intel’s come up with a project they call the Classmate with about the same size and price specs.

With all the talk about cheap laptops for kids in the developing world, news of these machines has made a lot of people–myself among them–eager to pick up cheap laptops for kids much closer to home, or in my case, actually in my home.

Two bills for a basic computer–capable of browsing the web, sending and recievining email, and doing basic office doc stuff–that’s been the missing link in the promise of the laptop. Ten years ago when laptops were finally approaching their current form factor, and cell phones were starting to become more common, the mythical untethering of computing power was, “Hey, with my cellphone and my laptop, I can work from the beach!”

Except that using a $2000 laptop near salt water and sand never really seemed all that practical in actual use. Never mind the issues of reading the screen in the sunlight or battery life. And in the ten years of ensuing computer evolution, the price barrier has never really dropped to the point where you could pick up a cheap “beater” computer. Laptops have remained basically tied to desks and cubes and the occasional airport. Subnotebooks have been interesting, but usually one has had to pay a premium for smaller size and reduced performance. Tablet PCs were supposed to be so easy to use in clipboard format that everyone would bring one everywhere, but that feature tended to bump up the price of the computer by at least 50% or so.

But $189 bucks. That’s cheaper than a decent iPod. It’s cheap enough to buy a kid a brand new laptop and hand it to him or her without a ten-minute “this is not a toy” speech, and with no hard drive, they’ll probably have decent battery life and stand up to some serious knocks. And that’s list price! In a year or two, you’ll be able to get one on closeout for half that.

This even makes the idea of buying one for hacking projects not that bad an idea. The hobbyist’s standby, the Parrallax BASIC Stamp microcontroller is already $80. For a bit more, you’ve got laptop with Ethernet and WiFi to run your robots, and you can program it directly through the Linux OS.

To be fair, you can’t go get one today, and there’s no hard release date beyond “by the end of the year.” But in the race to be the first with an ultra-low cost ultraportable Volkslaptop, Asus is taking the lead over the field.

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