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Hardware

The cheap computer phenomenon 63

Posted by sengan from the nothing-material-is-really-free dept.
One of the big stories of 1998 was the impact of ultracheap computers. The marketshare of computers which had stayed firmly stuck around 40% of US-households increased to 50%. Similarly Intel's market share collapsed in the mail-order and retail PC market: 75% of overall unit sales in the 1997 fourth quarter to about 49.5% in the most recent period. The cheapest computers reveal a trend of making money off services rather than hardware, with an associated lack of choice (don't expect to run Linux on these things): $300 PCs are shipping in France but you must use a specific ISP, zero-cost PCs are available if you agree to being bombarded by adverts even if you are not online (remember 1984: the TV things were always on), and finally zero-cost iMacs are available if you pledge to spend 3600 dollars over 3 years at some online mall. Moreover, the cost has already hit the industry: AMD is hurting while system development of Tier 1 manufacturers is leaving the US, being done instead by contract manufacturers in countries where electronics labour costs are less than a buck an hour. More people on the internet may be good, but at what cost?
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The cheap computer phenomenon More

The cheap computer phenomenon

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  • It all makes sense now!
  • While I agree with most of your points, the last figures I saw (good to the end of 1997, IIRC) show that net bandwidth has been increasing by 4% - 5% greater than net use on a per year basis. So while it may not be being put to good use, available bandwidth appears to be one place the net is actually getting better.
  • People who think like you forget one crucial fact: the folks in third-world countries who take these jobs are human, too.

    They take the jobs because they are better and higher-paying than what's on offer. The alternative is usually subsistance agriculture, which makes computer assembly look awfully decent.

    If those jobs weren't better, the third world folks wouldn't take 'em. That's the beauty of a free market.

    But what we end up with, in time, is workforces everywhere being reduced to near-subsistence wages. Nike has moved its manufacturing from country to country in Asia in search of the lowest possible wage, competitors follow suit. "American" automakers become Mexican ones, as long as two-dollar-a-day labor increases shareholder value. Ross Perot's famed "Giant Sucking Sound" was old news before he even coined the catchphrase; given time, that Sound will suck for nearly everybody. In Perot-ian fashion, let me direct you to this chart [panix.com].

    I don't mean to start a flame war, or to extend this thread; this is just a two-cents thing. My fear is that even though Amalgamated Widgets is helping out their short-term bottom line, they're reducing the pool of people who can afford to buy their products (Vietnamese shoe-assemblers make better money than a subsistence farmer until the contract runs out and the manufacturer moves to, say, Myanmar, but it's not so much more of a wage that they can run out and buy all the Modern Conveniences that we're used to in the West).

    If a new middle class in these new economies doesn't form/grow in both number and in purchasing power faster than the middle class shrinks in the West, there may be a problem in the long run. Of course, there's eleventy-jillion other factors at play; I just wanted to voice a concern about a couple. It all seems like a dollars-and-cents equivalent to the Behavioral Sink. I don't expect a well-fed venue like /. to give a damn about this, though. Thank you for your time.

    --

  • Amen. The downward spiral started the day AhOLe opened the spam gates. They proceeded to trample the net under their cloven hoves.
  • "Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me."

    Last I checked, unemployment levels in the US were remarkably low. I believe that part of this is due to the ability to buy things from overseas at low costs, lowering the cost of employing people in America for jobs that can't be moved overseas and lowering the expenses of those same workers. These overseas workers also become new consumers for the stuff we produce here. Jobs aren't some fixed quantity, they're created when someone feels it is profitable to hire you. Lower the cost of employment (for example, by lowering the cost of the computer you work on), and it's more likely you'll be considered profitable. My company has probably been able to hire 5% more people simply because of lower computer prices.

    I do agree, though, there has to be some morality in how we hire people overseas, that the jobs we provide should be better than the average livelihood in the foreign country.
  • I'd like to agree with the others that are roasting your genitalia over an open spit. Get off the Wintel bandwagon and face facts. SUN and other proprietary boxes have the advantage of running on a bus on a comparable speed to the chip. Instead of a bus speed 1/4th the speed of the processor (BX motherboards have a 100 mHz bus compared to the 400 mHz processor) hence creating a bottleneck. Also the video cards run a helluva lot faster to help allievate the bottlenecks. All external i/o devices run on a seperate bus, so that the multi-processor systems can actually talk to each other at their speed (be it 320 mhz or whatever). I too would pit a Sun Ultra system against a Wintel anyday.
  • Bad idea on the manufacturer's part, that is...

    What's to stop me from taking the PC and putting Linux on it? I could then redirect all the ads to /dev/null and the manufacturer wouldn't have a clue that I wasn't seeing the ads, since the incoming advertisement connections are politely accepted... :-)

    I really do NOT see how they're going to stop someone saying, "Hey! A free PC! Cool!", getting one, booting it off a boot disk and reformatting the hard drive. About the only way they could stop people from doing that is with a BIOS password that prevents changing the boot order of the computer. And even that is crackable: just remove the CMOS battery.

    This idea will never fly.
    -----
  • 3d world exploitation inevitably pisses of everyone involved, both at home and abroad. I know market pressures force this sort of stuff to happen, but shipping computer production to botswana or india *isn't* competition, for god's sake. It's a short-term stop-gap COP-OUT! I'm a rabid (albeit long-haired; think of me as a PJ O'Rourke republican) conservative and believer in markets but even *I* can recognise when greed gets out of hand.
    *sigh*
    What ever happened to good old fashioned ETHICAL capitalism? (Hey! It could happen! And occasionally has!)
    There should be laws that say "NO! If you live *here* you CAN'T screw your neighbor for your own enrichment!"
    I can't make adequate sense of what I'm trying to say here. I don't write that fast.
    The basic idea is, someone HERE is thinking "Hmmm... I can pay a 3d worlder *shit* to work for me and do an end run around domestic labor law; hell Clinton's in our pocket, look at all these mergers! Even Reagan wasn't that easy on business!"
    Hope I'm making sense. I'm seeing red right now...
  • Insofar as Microsoft and Intel have convinced a large number of Americans who would not otherwise buy a computer to buy one (and subsidize the rest of us), they have been responsible for the price drops. They've been handsomely compensated for their efforts, though.

    The fact that the PC market is more price-competitive than the Apple market, the Sun market, etc., may have a little bit to do with it too.
  • I deal all day long with cheap computers at work. I mean 350 mghz computers that are sssllloooowwwwwwwww, have strange errors all the time and generally work like crap. They cost my company so much money that they would hit the roof if they realized. Believe me, Macs would be a bargain compared to these pieces of shit.
    Celerons are fine, but those K-6's have weird network errors with ipx/spx installed.
    Buy a good MB (Asus P2B), and a fast HD. Under 10ms seek, at least 256k of cache and ULTRA DMA or SCSI!!!!!!!The extra $200/pc is the best money spent.
  • if they stoped paying upper and middle managment such crazy salaries, and reinvested it in R&D, maybe they could come out ontop...
  • Moore's law meets Murphy's law: prices of computer bits remain constant whilst the parts get better. I remember trying to get a Cyrix CPU for about 50 pounds, only for it to be taken off the market the next day because a new version had come out at the high end.

    Sure 486s cost less than $100 today - but you can only get them second hand.

  • An expensive computer is like a Jaguar. Extra show
    off value, but not extra benefit to your life over
    a cheap one..
    (Unless you're a Quake fan. *grin*)

    The day is coming when a compuer has the same
    value in our lives as a toaster: you replace it
    when it wears down enough and the hard drive actuator says its last hurrah, not because of flashy ads advertising expensive processors for the machine that is as usefull as my perfectly nice clunky 486.

    Code bloat used to sell. No longer.
  • I recently purchased a quantity of 233 MHz MediaGX machines from a local dealer. These are complete machines around $400 each and come with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.5 gigabyte hard drive, a real internal modem (not a Winmodem!), and Windows 98. All I had to do was add a $40 ne2000 compatible ethernet card and I now have a group of fairly fast servers that aren't too shabby at regular programming.

    So far, the MediaGX's around my house run Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Windows 98. Ironically, Windows NT won't install on these machines but it will run a pre-existing installation if restored from tape. Still, since I have no current need for NT, the Unixes on these boxes run just fine.

    Kris

    Kriston J. Rehberg
    http://kriston.net/ [kriston.net]

  • Disney merchandise, I have been told, is often produced at _less_ than $1 per hour, and in some cases under armed guard (I presume that the guards are paid a little more) because the workers are so desperate that they'll steal merchandise to help feed their families.


    What to do? If one boycotts such products, the oppressed workers don't even have the choice of being tyrannised, but if one doesn't, the practice is supported and encouraged by each purchase.


  • And if foreign corporations didn't own the natural resources of third world countries, third world folks wouldn't be reduced to being wage slaves to multinationals.

    That's the ugliness of the (un)free market.
  • Hard drives crash all the time. If my HD on my new free PC happens to crash the first time I run a program on it, such as Partition Magic, well of course I'll have to reinstall the software.

    If they didn't send me a CD, well, OK, I'll use one of mine; this here CheapBytes RedHat 5.2 CD is handy, I'll use it.

    If they email me in a few weeks asking why I never seem to log on, well, maybe this Internet thing is just too hard, or maybe their software isn't working right, how should I know? I'm just a poor old country boy.

    Hell, if the contract lets them take the computer back, it'll take months before they can get around to enforcing it. And then I just wipe the HD and give 'em their computer back. No harm done for me, I stored all my files on my servers.

    And if the contract wasn't negotiable, it's not a valid contract.

    Or, if you're scared of a few angry phone calls, well just set the damn thing up to dual boot. Log on once every couple of weeks and surf Slashdot, then boot back into Linux.
  • You are completely out of your fucking mind.

    Windows has been steadily rising in consumer price, while OEM price has been fairly steady recently but is still usually higher than it was during the Dos 6.x/Win 3.x days.

    Solaris is free for single-user noncommercial use.

    BSD is free.

    Microsoft may not charge a yearly fee, but they do have a penchant for releasing bugfixes as full operating systems, and they charge a shitload for them.

    As for people hating the Microsoft gives away IE, are you on crack? Pretty much Netscape and the DoJ hate that. Nobody else gives a shit.
  • So. Chip makers are in a huge price war. Prices collapse. Jobs are moved to places with cheap labor.

    Who loses?
    (1) The chip makers, who lose their monopoly profits (Intel). Maybe AMD and Cyrix too. Stockholders in losing chip makers.
    (2) The tiny minority of people who lose their high-paying, first world jobs. (Why is this a lose? Because they would not have stayed working for the chip maker unless it was better for them that way.)

    Who wins?
    (1) The tiny minority of people who gain low-paying, third world jobs. (Why a win? Because they would not have taken the job unless it was better that way for them.)
    (2) Everyone who buys a computer, cheap or not. Price drops at the bottom have dragged down prices up and down the line.

    The cost/benefit of who profits from the labor is a wash... everyone wants jobs, and it is hard to say that it is better to pay an American $20/hour to do the same thing that a Malayan will do for $1, if that means the Malayan and her family will starve.

    So the reality is this is a matter of corporate profits, versus the savings of consumers -- those consumers being you and I.

    Sengan makes this sound like a problem. It is not.
  • My company is selling K6-2 300Mhz eTowers for $399.99. They are selling faster than we can get them. Great little machines. No tech support problems, all quality Samsung parts. I bought a couple for myself. Runs Linux wonderfully.
  • What is wrong with the computer industry? When a business is in need of money, the solution is simple...raise prices. Five years ago I was happily paying $3500 for a computer, and like many people I was happy when the prices started to slide, but everyone assumed that the slide would be temporary. This obviously wasn't the case.

    Now the industry is in trouble and trying to find an easy way out, raising prices and keeping the jobs in the US sounds good to me. I realize that a lot of people are going to scream at the thought of paying more for a computer, but if it's neccesary to keep the industry viable, so be it. There's no reason for anyone to complain about spending $1500-$2000 on a computer (I've always found sub-$1000 PC's to be kind of a bad joke anyway).
  • Or make a HD image with the program Ghost. You still have a copy of the original hard drive, and you can clear the existing when you need to make use of it. Then, when you want to use Windows, swap images with the Linux/Be/What Ever image and it only takes a few minutes.

    As long as the software still exists, and you use their net service for 10 hrs a month and you display the ads, you are in good shape.
  • Good to see someones thinking
  • Say, here's a thought...

    If I understand it correctly, the whole Free-PC concept is based on a border surrounding an 800x600 user area on the screen, right? (whereas the entire thing is 1024x768). And ads are displayed in this border area, right?

    So-- instead of cracking the system, reformatting the HD, booting off a floppy, etc.-- couldn't you just put a paper cutout over the screen, and literally block out the advertising?

    (Well, granted, it still won't be running our favorite OS, but that does kind of short out the entire principle-- doesn't it?)
  • ...Do you folks really think there's a Linux daemon for this ad thing that would automatically install on your partition if you made one? Doesn't sound to me like there's going to be anything to redirect...

    And, as far as the legal thing goes, wouldn't it make more sense (since the thing IS free) to just spring $200 for a new drive and get to use your whole drive instead of having however much swallowed by ads? You could just leave the old one in there and remove the IDE cable. Leave the power one in, it'd give you that extra little technicality thing to be smug about...

    cygnus
    "I feel like a quote out of context."
  • Intel is clearly in a price war with AMD & the former has somewhat deeper pockets. So, buy AMD.... To keep prices down and tech innovation up, but.... Free Trad/Liberalization of Markets, leads potentially to unethical companies exploiting cheap wages off shore (or @ home by disabling unions-of course it is a question of a sane balance), ie Nike, GM (seen the movie Roger & I ????) And/or read some Marx or Jurgen Habermas. So, my suggestion is to boycott companies who do this anti- general human well-being thingy. Remember boycotts s worked with drift net fishing & scared the hell of McDonald s, so the latter stopped chopping down rain forests. I mean, what is the point of stopping the Borg in their tracks, cause they are creepie, if you then load and EXCEPTIONAL OS called Linux, on the backs of third world sweat shop labor? Possibly inconsistent? Also, as a newbie, THANX to all you hackers who put together the amazing OS :-)

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