Can a $150 laptop be any good?

The headline seemed silly to me, as a technologist, as the interpretation of 'any' is highly subjective. But the point Mossberg makes in the article indirectly (or perhaps inadvertently) is that ARM and Linux have crushed the margins out of low end CPUs and operating systems (with a bit of help on OS pricing from Apple).

The insight here is that the two most expensive "parts" of a PC have always been the CPU and the OS license. Intel derived fat margins on their CPUs as the only game in town (sometimes illegally hindering rivals) and Microsoft derived fat margins by being the only OS worth having given the breadth of software available for it. The combination, the so called Win-Tel hegemony, was dominant for years.

And the tricky bit is that typical mark-up for a hardware device was 3 - 4x the price of the parts to build it. That multiple takes into account things like warranty returns, unsold inventory, losses in shipment, and two channels of distribution mark up. So priced at X the device sells for 1.4X to distributors, and then 3x to consumers. But the interesting side effect there is that every $1 you take off the price of components is $3 less at the consumer level.

As ARM chips got more capable, and Linux became more acceptable, I mark the beginning of the end as the day Asus shipped its first NetBook running Linux in 2007, and then tried to ship an ARM powered laptop a year later.

That stunt allowed ASUS to wrangle a nearly zero cost Windows XP license for its Netbooks from Microsoft. And the Atom chip, which Intel was pushing for "embedded" applications against the fast growing ARM franchise, had the lowest margins yet for a GenuineIntel processor.

With margins on the CPU and OS under assault, the whole value chain began to normalize around the minimum quality cost of the components. Combine that with the advancement of capability with process shrinks at the same price, and eventually the processors you could use would have the same capabilities as the "high end" ones did back in 2007.

The net result has been that things like the Raspberry Pi are possible, a $35 dollar computer that out performs machines from the turn of the century, but were reasonably useful. And now the "cheap" stuff has gotten into the performance ranges of the "performant" stuff from 2006, the year everyone stopped buying new computers every year because they didn't have to.

Today you have ChromeOS and Ubuntu Unity and Firefox OS and a number of interesting alternatives that are free or mostly so, and 64 bit ARM processors which sell for less than a 1/3 what the same performance 64 bit x86 processor sells for. And the collateral damage of that is you can put together a pretty capable unit for not a lot of money. Tether it to a $10 phone from Walmart and its really amazing.

Kill the trackpad. Everybody hates trackpads but people keep making excuses for them. When HP made a convertable PC the users said "the trackpad sucks" and decided to put in a bigger trackpad that still sucks.

The least cost PC is a tablet. Want a keyboard? Get a bluetooth keyboard. Touchscreen not good enough? Get a bluetooth mouse.

Either way you can spend a lot or a little and choose a mouse and keyboard that you like.

Yes. My parents and many of my friends use $150 Chromebooks from years ago and love them. I don't need Walt Mossberg, former Apple shill, to tell me whether a laptop is good.