33 ms·

There was an article these days about how companies are starting to wish for the other face of Moore's law: computers getting cheaper every year at the same per

There was an article these days about how companies are starting to wish for the other face of Moore's law: computers getting cheaper every year at the same performance. The article was about the next Windows, but I always thought it applies much better to laptops. I'd say there are three levels of performance suitable for such mini-machines: - The equivalent of the last 486 or the first pentiums: can play mp3, browse the web (without the bells and whistles), display a pdf, run simple office applications, have ethernet and usb, may not have wireless. This is what a real $100 laptop should be like, and what readers could become (keyboard?) - Can show movies, run a contemporary OS and application suite (including last versions of Open/Microsoft Office) - pretty much everything an office computers does, without the games and other needy apps. This is already covered, as there are many cheap laptops just like this. - Sub $100 laptops. This is a very interesting field, because anything can be done. Text-only and monochrome displays, dedicated applications, the field is huge and the prices can be as low as any hand-held chinese game ($10 is not at all absurd). There are two big issues here: compatibility and net connectivity. I don't know what an USB or Ethernet chip goes for, but it it's $2 it's too much.

paddy_m 18y ago
I had a 486 Dx4 120 (AMD), eventually with 64MB of ram, it always ran NT4. I remember downloading mp3s in 1997 or 1998. The machine couldn't play the mp3, but I could decode it in bulk to wav files, which it could play.
- bemmu 18y ago
  I remember Winamp could play MP3s if at 22khz but not 44 :)
ph0rque 18y ago
Yup... I've been wishing for a touch-screen, 4"x3" display I can hang in all the rooms of my house to control a variety of things... I think the sweet spot in terms of price would be $20-$50.
potatolicious 18y ago
The problem is that there's a very real and finite limit to the "Moore's price law" as you mentioned. Yes, things get cheaper rapidly after initial R&D, but this slows down dramatically after a few years. Once the initial R&D cost is recouped you will find that there is still a significant production cost that is slow to reduce and doesn't really move much at all. I recently bought a 200MHz ARM7 board with 128MB of RAM. At bulk rates it still costs ~$70 a pop, and you still have to add peripherals to that to make it a viable personal computer. At these prices we're hitting close to production cost.
old-gregg 18y ago
You'll be surprised if you find an actual PC with 486. I have installed XP on a Pentium II machine with 256MB of RAM and it was barely usable even for web surfing. Without bells and whistles: scrolling simple text+picture pages in IE/FF was very slow. Launching any non-trivial application also took terribly long. Not just the Office, but even Firefox felt more like Photoshop. I couldn't believe how bloated the software had become. These $100 machines you're talking about can't run normal software, you'll need Microsoft to start selling Win98 or you'd need a stripped-down Linux with XFCE or something. The key to performance IMO is smaller binary sizes: those CPUs had tiny caches and pathetic memory throughput. Pentiums ran on 33-66Mz FSB, compare it to 1066Mz of modern machines.
- omouse 18y ago
  Isn't it amazing how software bloats and slows down so that it only fits the latest generation of hardware? We were doing web browsing of the simple text+pictures kind back in the early 90s. Word processing and spreadsheeting has been done since the late 70s, early 80s (I think).
  - 10ren 18y ago
    Totally agree. I wonder, with a market of a billion users, does a set of software apps that are not back-compatible with our bloated legacy become plausible? You could use old Windows or Unix apps. Or DOS apps. Or even old Apple ][ apps. Or, you could write an entirely new set of apps - a fresh start, in a fresh market, on fresh hardware. Doesn't that have a certain appeal? Freed from back-compatibility with bloated software, does a $10 laptop become plausible? Maybe something like the hp200lx: DOS, 24x80 LCD screen with incredible battery life (2 AA batteries), came with lotus 123 spreadsheet etc. Or, even lower specs than that.
- l0stman 18y ago
  In fact, I have an old Toshiba laptop with initially 256MB of RAM. It had both Windows XP and FreeBSD+KDE in dual boot. Windows XP takes forever to boot and runs like a snail. On the other hand FreeBSD was pretty usable. But one day, some part of the RAM stopped to run stripping it down to 68MB. Even FreeBSD+KDE wasn't usable anymore. So I decided to use Enlightenment as a window manager instead. Installing only the strict necessary: xmms for listening to music, vlc for videos, emacs as a text editor and for coding, xpdf as a pdf viewer, feh as image viewer. The performance is pretty correct. It doesn't have an internet connexion because I found out I'm more productive without it when coding. So I use it more than I expected to get things done.

paddy_m 18y ago

I had a 486 Dx4 120 (AMD), eventually with 64MB of ram, it always ran NT4. I remember downloading mp3s in 1997 or 1998. The machine couldn't play the mp3, but I could decode it in bulk to wav files, which it could play.

bemmu 18y ago
I remember Winamp could play MP3s if at 22khz but not 44 :)

ph0rque 18y ago

Yup... I've been wishing for a touch-screen, 4"x3" display I can hang in all the rooms of my house to control a variety of things... I think the sweet spot in terms of price would be $20-$50.

potatolicious 18y ago

The problem is that there's a very real and finite limit to the "Moore's price law" as you mentioned. Yes, things get cheaper rapidly after initial R&D, but this slows down dramatically after a few years. Once the initial R&D cost is recouped you will find that there is still a significant production cost that is slow to reduce and doesn't really move much at all. I recently bought a 200MHz ARM7 board with 128MB of RAM. At bulk rates it still costs ~$70 a pop, and you still have to add peripherals to that to make it a viable personal computer. At these prices we're hitting close to production cost.

old-gregg 18y ago

You'll be surprised if you find an actual PC with 486. I have installed XP on a Pentium II machine with 256MB of RAM and it was barely usable even for web surfing. Without bells and whistles: scrolling simple text+picture pages in IE/FF was very slow. Launching any non-trivial application also took terribly long. Not just the Office, but even Firefox felt more like Photoshop. I couldn't believe how bloated the software had become. These $100 machines you're talking about can't run normal software, you'll need Microsoft to start selling Win98 or you'd need a stripped-down Linux with XFCE or something. The key to performance IMO is smaller binary sizes: those CPUs had tiny caches and pathetic memory throughput. Pentiums ran on 33-66Mz FSB, compare it to 1066Mz of modern machines.

omouse 18y ago
Isn't it amazing how software bloats and slows down so that it only fits the latest generation of hardware? We were doing web browsing of the simple text+pictures kind back in the early 90s. Word processing and spreadsheeting has been done since the late 70s, early 80s (I think).
- 10ren 18y ago
  Totally agree. I wonder, with a market of a billion users, does a set of software apps that are not back-compatible with our bloated legacy become plausible? You could use old Windows or Unix apps. Or DOS apps. Or even old Apple ][ apps. Or, you could write an entirely new set of apps - a fresh start, in a fresh market, on fresh hardware. Doesn't that have a certain appeal? Freed from back-compatibility with bloated software, does a $10 laptop become plausible? Maybe something like the hp200lx: DOS, 24x80 LCD screen with incredible battery life (2 AA batteries), came with lotus 123 spreadsheet etc. Or, even lower specs than that.
l0stman 18y ago
In fact, I have an old Toshiba laptop with initially 256MB of RAM. It had both Windows XP and FreeBSD+KDE in dual boot. Windows XP takes forever to boot and runs like a snail. On the other hand FreeBSD was pretty usable. But one day, some part of the RAM stopped to run stripping it down to 68MB. Even FreeBSD+KDE wasn't usable anymore. So I decided to use Enlightenment as a window manager instead. Installing only the strict necessary: xmms for listening to music, vlc for videos, emacs as a text editor and for coding, xpdf as a pdf viewer, feh as image viewer. The performance is pretty correct. It doesn't have an internet connexion because I found out I'm more productive without it when coding. So I use it more than I expected to get things done.