There has been a lot of talk over the recent years about the digital divide. I do think that the digital divide is real, so I have followed with interest the $100 laptop that has been in development for a while now, and a recent story at ComputerWorld shows just how close these laptops are to reality. The idea behind these laptops is to eliminate the digital divide by making a computer available to [almost] anyone in the world at a low price.
The basic specs include a 500mhz AMD CPU, 512MB of flash memory that serves as both RAM and permanent storage, a 7 x 4 LCD screen, wireless capability, and Fedora Core Linux. I think it's great that RedHat is shrinking Fedora Core to fit in the limited memory and still leave room for storage; their goal is to shrink Fedora Core from the standard 1.3 GB install down to just 130 MB with all of the essential applications. Considering that OS X ships on a DVD and Microsoft recommends a 40 GB hard drive for Vista, that's pretty remarkable.
Thinking back to the Commodore book that I read a month ago, a little system like this could be the next Commodore. The Commodore was a stock computer without customization (take that, Dell!), was sold in one configuration for almost a decade, was extremely affordable, and met the needs of the average home user. By 2010, I bet 4 GB of RAM could be included for the same price as 512 MB now, and that would be plenty for most users. I sometimes help out some older folks with their computers. Do you know how many 80 GB hard drives I see with only 1.5 GB used, several years after the computer was purchased? The 7 x 4 screen is admittedly tiny (especially for older folks) and would probably be a big sticking point, but could probably be larger for not that much more money.
I predict that in the next five years, we see a consumer backlash against the ever-increasing computing power and the resource-hogging OSes of the world. Imagine how wonderful it would be to plunk down $200 and get a little machine that "just works" for word processing, email and Internet. Let's be honest here: that's what most people use the PC for at home. If you think that this kind of "one size fits all" logic can't work today, I'd just like to point out that it has been very successful for one company for the last decade. The company is Apple, and the computer is the iMac. There are millions of identical iMacs out there. Now just imagine if they cost $200 instead of $1,300.
I'd buy one.
Maybe one way around the small screen size would be TV-out, like on this (linux-based) device: http://www.gp2x.com/. I'm assuming the "TV divide" is much smaller than the computer counterpart.