OSNews

In the first part of your article you state that the reason people don't switch to Apple is for the price and Linux for the learning curve. People want cheap and easy, you say. But towards the end of the article you contradict yourself:

Imagine this. An itty-bitty Mac with a 1GHz single core, 256MB, NO HARD DRIVE and NO DISC DRIVE --instead 4 front accessible USB slots via which the user can add flash memory. Add 2 USB ports to the back, a GB ethernet port, an eSATA port for external hard drives, maybe a firewire port, and an HDMI and you have a super slim, sexy and inexpensive system.

That sounds a bit complicated for anyone, let alone my parents and other non-techies I know. Do you really expect someone who returns a computer because the printer won't install and who fears a change from a standard Windows-based PC to really be able to decipher USB flash memory, eSATA, Firewire (which Apple no longer pushes BTW) and HDMI?

I've owned a Mac Mini (G4) and I loved the simplicity and elegance of both the hardware and the OS. It was a bit slow, even with 512MB RAM, but it worked very well for anything other than the latest 3D game titles. It was as close as any major manufacturer has come to making a PC as simple to set up and use as a video game console.

Instead, you propose a system with no internal storage, and no optical media reader. You even suggest that the consumer supply their own Flash RAM and OS. After all, with no hard drive to store the OS and no optical drive to install one if there was, the user is left to her own devices. How is it again that Mom and Dad are supposed to go about this alone? What you propose is utter nonsense, something that is much more complicated than even the horrible systems offered by Dell and HP.