The Chromebook is only a reasonable appliance precisely because of the sophisticated programmability of Javascript. So your "one option would be not to support

The Chromebook is only a reasonable appliance precisely because of the sophisticated programmability of Javascript. So your "one option would be not to support JS" proposal is directly contradictory with your selected example (the Chromebook) of a single-function computing gadget. More generally, I'll echo the concerns of everyone else here: we seem to be getting greener by using more-general-purpose computing, that necessitates less devices, and less frequent upgrading. Especially because we now see that once devices reach a certain level of power, we actually buy new ones far less often. (Many people now happily own 5-year-old desktops, not because they cannot afford more, but because they're too LAZY to buy a new one for the small marginal benefits... and laptops are headed slowly in that direction. Cell phones and tablets are still far from that transition.) On the other hand... your observation about the 3% penetration in India, assuming it's factually true, does sound like SOME kind of an opportunity. Making things radically cheaper is always an important disruption (c.f. the original sense of "disruptive innovation", which doesn't just mean "we beat the competition"). And certainly if you can sell to 0.01% of Indian farmers (say 100k households?), that's a hell of a lot of units over which to amortize the high fixed cost of circuit design and tape-out. Although only if you really can come up with a single design that meets the needs of such a huge and probably diverse market. Sounds very hard. Plus, of course, as many sages (e.g. pg) observe repeatedly, if it were obviously a good idea then your competition would already have done it, which means that IF it's ACTUALLY a good idea, the crowd of naysayers here (myself included) is a good sign for your project. ;) In short, I'm really sceptical about your fundamental hypothesis, but good luck with figuring it out.