So my older daughter, Elizabeth, has been playing with this recently.
Dell Mini Inspiron -- Not Quite Free Yet
This is a Dell Mini Inspiron — a pretty typical Netbook, although the keyboard seems better than most netbooks. However, the touchpad has touch sensitive areas at the bottom of the trackpad, rather than physical buttons, for the left and right moust buttons.
But this isn’t a review. What’s interesting about this is how we acquired it.
I was looking around for a laptop to send off with Elizabeth to college, and settled on the Dell Studio 15. We actually haven’t gotten it yet. However, Dell had this offer — buy the higher end Studio 15, and get a Mini Inspiron for $149. That’s about half the list price.
We’ve already seen talk of cell providers possibly subsidizing netbooks with built-in wireless broadband. “Get a 2-year data contract, and we’ll toss in the netbook for free.” After all, a $299 PC costs less than a high end mobile phone.
I predict that we’ll start to see a raft of these kinds of offers. “Buy a desktop PC, get a Netbook free!” That’s when you know PCs have become commodities. I wonder when we’ll start seeing them offered in grocery store and drugstore aisles.
Another sign of commodization is when people care more about how it looks than what’s inside. The vast majority of car buyers buy cars for color, styling, comfort, and not because it’s “the ultimate driving machine.” Similarly, we’re seeing styling become important to a certain segment of the PC market. High end gamers with large amounts of money will buy hand painted cases. But you can buy a Dell Studio 15 customized with any of several hundred case designs, created by different artists. Who cares what’s inside? It looks cool on the outside.
The cool thing about all this is the affordability. Recently, one friend told me one of his schoolteacher friends had bought netbooks for all the students in the class; many were fairly low income. That teacher was certainly generous, but a few years ago, that would have been simply impossible. PCs as commodities may be what finally levels the digital divide.
“PCs as commodities may be what finally levels the digital divide.”
And I would add smartphones/iphones…The recent Pew report on handheld/smartphone internet use is significant because it mentions how these devices are having a significant impact on decreasing the digital divide in groups that traditionally have not had as much access to the ‘net (e.g., blacks, hispanics…)