The Disposable Laptop

A friendof mine sent me a listing for a $300 Asus laptop over at Newegg:

Granted,this isn’t the laptop of your dreams. You aren’t going to run Photoshop onthis, or even Windows: it comes with Linux. And it only has a 2 GB solid-statehard drive. But it is tiny, it is light, and it ushers in a new class of what Ilike to think is the disposable laptop. Corporate IT managers take note.

Are youtired of continually being burned with buying laptops in the +$1,200 range thatgo obsolete even before they arrive on your loading dock? Even at a $1,600 pricepoint, it doesn’t take much more than a month or two before HP and Dell andLenovo "refresh" (isn’t that a wonderful euphemism for "you justgot screwed on that deal") their laptop lines with something with more CPUfirepower, more RAM , more disk, and more graphics.
My20-something computer-savvy stepson was bemoaning this fact recently to me, andhe paid about $1,000 last year for an HP laptop that has a beautiful screen butnot much of the real firepower he needs.

I onceasked the guys from Lenovo why they couldn’t make an inexpensive laptop thathad a bazillion hours of battery with not the latest and greatest stuff on it,and they claimed that no one would buy such a machine. Let’s see if Asus canprove them wrong.

It makessense to buy something that you can expense, throw away (or give to your usersto keep as their own) or replace within a year. Think of how much money youcurrently spend on the fancier laptops that break down, get lost or damaged.Dribble some soda in its keyboard? No problem! Tossed from the overhead luggagebin by mistake? You can pick up another one tomorrow for not much more than anice dinner.

Ok, theone spec that troubles me is the 2 GB disk. For another $100, you can doublethat, or buy a USB thumb drive that has plenty of room for your files. Do wereally need 100 GB drives to carry around all of our personal data anyway?Everything is going online, and just the other side of the browser lies theuntapped riches of the Internet, your corporate data, and all that.

Why do weneed all that room to store email messages since 1994, when there are perfectlygood Webmail solutions that take up 0 GB of local storage?

And whathappens when these laptops get stolen from the airport X-ray belt, or from ourhotel rooms, or in my case from the trunk of a parked car? Better to havesomething that we just don’t care too much about to begin with. And let’s faceit, most of the room on our laptops is storage that isn’t work-related anyway:vacation videos, MP3s, and so forth.

Plus,with the Asus, you don’t have to pay the Microsoft poll tax of Windows/Office.Yes, I am sure that there are some corporate standard documents that aren’tgoing to like the Linux-based open office, but so what? Deal with it when youget back home.

Sure, Ilust after the sleekness of the MacBook Air (but not its lukewarm specs), thesolid tank-like construction of a Lenovo X-series, and the compactness of myDell X-1 (which is now getting a bit long in the tooth).  

But theAsus has my vote when it comes to a no-brainer purchase. And it even comes inseveral colors, including pink! How can you not want one right now?