If I wanted to sell a domestic computer I'd do what Apple did a while ago and make it look good. It's supposed to go in someone's home. That's the secret of the laptop-on-a-stick, sorry, the iMac. It also sells into the corporate environment to an extent. This surprises me.
Someone has now decided to ape the company and put a laptop-on-a-stick into the PC-compatible world. The
EEE model will be out later this year and there can be little doubt that it will go into businesses in the same way the Apple equivalent has done.
The interesting thing to me is that we're all supposed to be more sensitive than we previously were about ecological issues. Recycling is important to everyone and computers form a major component of landfill sites - I saw some research a while back that said the IT industry is actually more damaging than the areonautical industry in that respect.
And suddenly we're being pushed laptops on sticks, closed units in which you might be able to upgrade a little memory but nothing else - once you need to upgrade these babies, you're talking about discarding the whole unit.
I'd like to think it'll never catch on. But I'd bet it will.
