Wal-Mart has decided to call it quits on selling the gPC in stores, which is the ultra-cheap $199 desktop computer that debuted last year. A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said that it “really wasn’t what our customers were looking for,” and I think I understand what she was trying to say. What probably ended up happening with the people who bought it was that they expected all of their Windows apps to run on it, but when they got home and got it setup they found out that it was running the Linux gOS. Obviously this would provide a lot of limitations especially if a user specifically bought Windows software at the store thinking that it would run on the machine. They probably got an exceptionally large amount of these returned to the store for that reason.
Wal-Mart isn’t discontinuing the machine all together though. They are still going to sell it online for the low $199 price, but I’m guessing they won’t be flying off the shelf like they were in the store.
I went searching around Wal-Mart’s site and found that they actually have a pretty low budget Vista machine available. That’s $278 for a Vista Basic machine with twice the memory (1GB) of the gPC that’s being pulled from the store shelves. Depending on what you value the extra RAM at this is quite a steal, and is likely more what their customers would be looking for.
[via Yahoo News]
I would imagine if they had better marketing explaining that the the gOS PC didn’t come with windows might have helped. Also, I think if there was a windows emulator, such as WINE embedded in gOS that automatically handled .exe files, it would’ve made a huge difference. In the end, I feel that the average consumer would’ve had everything they needed from this machine (web browsing, email, photo uploading, media playback) but unfortunately, they don’t know anything better than Windows…
It’s funny this computer seems fine for many of the people I know. The only problem is people associate computers with either Apple or Windows (aka Microsoft), but many people even if they know about computers and Linux don’t seem to make the full connection between the two. If some PR could be started in this area I think Linux would be poised to make a big push in the consumer space.
How ‘crippled’ is Vista Basic compared to Vista Home Premium?
Home Basic is missing the media center and the Glass interface. That’s all I know of. However having used Home Premium I can tell you it’s networking does not work as nicely as the business edition which is closest to XP Pro out of all the editions. So if you use Vista in a highly networked environment it might be worth getting business or ultimate. Home Basic will probably work just as well as XP Home for most things. In fact I doubt you would really feel you were missing anything unless you read a lot of news.
For a casual user it’s not really as bad as some make it seem. You don’t get the fancy transparency (Aero) nor the Media Center capabilities, but you’ll be able to run the Windows apps still. If I was deciding between the two computers (gPC or Vista Home Basic) for someone less knowledgeable about computers I would choose the one with Vista for the extra $80. In the end I know that they’d be coming back to me less with problems. And having tried to get less tech savvy people switched over to Linux before I can say that it’s not fun.