Posted on 01/05/2008 5:51:16 AM PST by twntaipan
Who in the *** is Asustek, and why does Microsoft hate them more than any other company in the industry? Why does Apple, Dell and Palm Computing hate them?
And why does Intel love them?
Taiwan's Asustek -- better known as ASUS -- is one of the most interesting, innovative and fastest-growing companies in technology.
At its core, Asustek makes motherboards -- more than any other company. Asustek motherboards are the heart of Sony's PlayStation 2 consoles, Apple MacBooks, Alienware PCs, and some HP computers.
But that's not why they're hated. The source of ire is a tiny laptop called the ASUS Eee PC. This open, flexible, relatively powerful, and very small laptop is notable for one feature above all: It's price. The Eee PC can be had for as little as $299. (Go here to read the reviews -- they're all positive.)
Let's take a moment to ponder how cheap that is. This full-featured laptop costs $69 less than the 16 GB Apple iPod Touch. It's $100 less than an Amazon Kindle e-book reader. The most expensive configuration for the ASUS Eee PC on Amazon.com is $499.
Even though ASUS isn't a well-known consumer brand, and even though the company just started selling them in late 2007, the company expects to sell up to a half million units by March, and up to 5 million by 2009.
The reason Microsoft hates Asustek couldn't be more obvious. The Eee PC runs Linux (Xandros running KDE) and uses an appealing and innovative tabbed-based user interface developed by Asustek. The device also comes with OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office replacement, and Firefox. The entire system -- hardware, OS, office suite and applications -- costs $30 less than Amazon.com's discounted price for Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate alone. The Asus Eee PC is demonstrating to the world that its success depends on aggressively *avoiding* any Microsoft product.
Apple and Dell hate Asustek because these companies have been planning for quite a while to introduce flash storage-based mini laptops. But by the time they get around to shipping, the ASUS Eee PC will have already gobbled up some of the market. Worse, the ASUS Eee PC is preemptively poisoning the well by applying enormous price pressure on these two companies.
In truth, Apple isn't all that concerned because they'll do what they do, and the masses will respond. But poor Dell. That company's flash-based mini-laptop will probably cost five times as much as the ASUS. It will be 10% better and 500% more expensive than the ASUS Eee PC. Good luck with that, Dell!
Palm, Inc. hates Asustek because the company has made a fool out of them. Palm announced in May its Foleo mini-laptop. The device was slightly bigger than the ASUS Eee PC, but less capable and twice the price. The Foleo focused on connecting to the Internet through Palm's own line of giant cell phones. While many think Palm "killed" the Foleo, they in fact only killed the idea of shipping with a Linux-based OS.
In his blog announcement, Palm's CEO vowed to come back with a Foleo-like device that runs the same proprietary OS that powers Palm's next-generation of cell phones. By the time Palm gets around to shipping something, the market will be saturated with millions of ASUS Eee PCs on the low end, and thousands of Apple and Dell units on the high end.
Meanwhile, Intel loves Asustek. The ASUS Eee PC is powered by -- you guessed it! -- an Intel processor, namely the 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M. More than that, Intel respects Asustek for its engineering prowess. Intel discovered this fact when the company was struggling in the 1990s to fix a range of design flaws in its own 486 motherboard prototypes. Asustek was able to fix it, and in fact already had a fully operational motherboard for the chipset before Intel did. Since then, the companies have been very close.
Now rumors are circulating that a new Intel Merom-based ASUS Eee PC that may ship as early as April will run so efficiently that it won't need a fan. The entire laptop will be solid state -- no moving parts. Intel loves that kind of thing.
There's no question about it -- Asustek is the most hated company in the industry. Microsoft, Apple, Dell and Palm hate Asustek because the company can give us something they can't: A super cheap, flexible, powerful mobile computer. At $299, why would anyone not buy one?
I see several posts that state that they have never had problems with an ASUS motherboard. I only assemble about a half dozen computers a year, mostly for extended family and a few friends so I make no claim to have any statistically significant knowledge of ASUS quality control. I used ASUS for about 2 years before I ran into problems with their motherboards. The real difficulty starts when you try to get a bad board replaced. Their customer service sucks beyond belief. Even in today’s world where horrendous customer service is the norm, ASUS stands unsurpassed in lousy service. When (If) you finally get permission to return the board, they will not cross ship even with a credit card. You must wait for them to complete the evaluation of the returned board and determine whether or not they will replace it. Your willingness to give them a credit card to guarantee payment is totally irrelevant to them. You can be down for weeks while they suck their thumb and obfuscate. I’ve been down this road twice with ASUS motherboards. I’ll not go down it again.
I realize that this says nothing about the new laptop, but I for one would be leary of jumping on this particular bandwagon.
2Gb will hold a lot of word processing. My entire manuscript-in-progress tops out at about 772Mb (375+ pages).
Portability—only 2 lbs — and the speed of the booting — make it a great machine for web surfing and emailing (which is what most people use $1000 plus machines for).
I tried Ubunto. About a year ago. I couldn’t ‘wrap’ my head around the idea of a wrapper for the wifi.
I’ll try again when I get a down week.
thx.
Their ASUS motherboards are usually a little more expensive than others...
If it has been a year, then in all likelihood you won’t need to use ndswrapper for wifi.
Thanks for the great info! I want at least the 8GB version and I might hold out for the fanless Meron. All I want to do is surf and FReep wirelessly, and I can certainly do that with the Eee PC and Linux.
That 2GB total disk has to hold the OS and all your software. Your available document space will be a much smaller fraction of that. Still, it has USB slots, so you can add an additional USB flash drive to keep all your docs on
Of course. That's assumed.
HALLELUJAH!
HALLELUJAH!
SICK EM ASUS!
P4C800E here. Dual-boots RH and XP just fine.
I haven't had a chance to play with 7.10 just yet. But I've been very pleased with Feisty in a VM.
Mark
Thanks for the link Petro. Those guys are really goofy.
To find all those just go to Distrowatch....
Related thread with many links:
So, just what can you do with this ASUS Eee Linux PC thing anyway?
Development Releases: Linux Mint 4.0 Beta "Fluxbox", 4.0 Alpha "Debian"
This is a Beta Live CD,...not yet installable to a Hard Drive.
Solid state is considerably more expensive than rotating storage per MB. It's just now getting cheap enough to make devices like this possible. It does contribute to the portability and to some degree the cost, by allowing a reasonable battery life with much smaller batteries, and contributes to the performance because of reduced latency compared to rotating storage. It should also be much less prone to physical shock damage. IMHO
bump for later
It looks like the next (or one of the next) versions of the eeePC will have Wimax built in. Check this article out for more info: http://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/01/02/eee-pc-with-wimax/
I would consider the long haul anything where I actually have to be looking at the screen for more than an hour. This would be fine for plugging into a projector or quick 5 to 10 minute things, but anything that would be actual computer work is out. When I was younger and could read the small print on medicine bottles without effort sure, but like Steely Dan says, those days are gone forever. I now consider 14” to be a minimum useful screen size.
I ran DSL off a chip on an old IBM thinkpad. Pretty cool the apps on such a small size. Very clean and quick. What every has worked out of the box( disk ) on a Linux distro, has worked fine. I just get jammed at road bumps and don’t understand the fixes. There are so many forums that I just drift around for hours.
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