A friend
of 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 on
this, or even Windows: it comes with Linux. And it only has a 2 GB solid-state
hard drive. But it is tiny, it is light, and it ushers in a new class of what I
like to think is the disposable laptop. Corporate IT managers take note.
Are you
tired of continually being burned with buying laptops in the +$1,200 range that
go obsolete even before they arrive on your loading dock? Even at a $1,600 price
point, it doesn't take much more than a month or two before HP and Dell and
Lenovo "refresh" (isn't that a wonderful euphemism for "you just
got screwed on that deal") their laptop lines with something with more CPU
firepower, more
RAM , more disk, and more graphics.
My
20-something computer-savvy stepson was bemoaning this fact recently to me, and
he paid about $1,000 last year for an HP laptop that has a beautiful screen but
not much of the real firepower he needs.
I once
asked the guys from Lenovo why they couldn't make an inexpensive laptop that
had 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 can
prove them wrong.
It makes
sense to buy something that you can expense, throw away (or give to your users
to keep as their own) or replace within a year. Think of how much money you
currently spend on the fancier laptops that break down, get lost or damaged.
Dribble some soda in its keyboard? No problem! Tossed from the overhead luggage
bin by mistake? You can pick up another one tomorrow for not much more than a
nice dinner.
Ok, the
one spec that troubles me is the 2 GB disk. For another $100, you can double
that, or buy a
USB thumb drive that has plenty of room for your files. Do we
really 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 the
untapped riches of the Internet, your corporate data, and all that.
Why do we
need all that room to store email messages since 1994, when there are perfectly
good Webmail solutions that take up 0 GB of local storage?
And what
happens when these laptops get stolen from the airport X-ray belt, or from our
hotel rooms, or in my case from the trunk of a parked car? Better to have
something that we just don't care too much about to begin with. And let's face
it, 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't
going to like the Linux-based open office, but so what? Deal with it when you
get back home.
Sure, I
lust after the sleekness of the MacBook Air (but not its lukewarm specs), the
solid tank-like construction of a Lenovo X-series, and the compactness of my
Dell X-1 (which is now getting a bit long in the tooth).
But the
Asus has my vote when it comes to a no-brainer purchase. And it even comes in
several colors, including pink! How can you not want one right now?
