What a price difference. Wow. Dozens, nay, hundred of hours learning Linux finally pays off. Seriously now, I'm really pleased to see that you can choose Linux and pay so much less. Of course on a relatively more expensive machine that difference isn't much, but it's certainly a stark difference on such a cheap device.
Edit: I see there's a hardware difference too. That's a bit of a shame. I wonder what corporate forces are in action here..
I don't think it's evil corporate forces. They wanted a "budget" one with lower specs and realised they could reduce the price further by removing the Windows license.
You're probably right. I didn't mean evil corporate forces. I will certainly concede that I used the wrong term. I was earnestly curious what the justification was. I should've said "business justification" or some such, given the (reasonable) interpretation of what I actually said.
Once again Linux is the "cheap" option. Linux isn't used by people to save the license cost and well I know I have a much greater need for RAM compared to the average computer user. So I would buy a $149 version then have to install Linux on top of that.
Sure, but Linux can also generally run much more efficiently than Windows. I think having Linux on the cheap version could conceivably be both a cut in licensing fees and also a way to make economy hardware specs viable.
I mentioned it above, but there is no license fee for Windows 8.1 with Bing. It's completely free for OEMs to sell on their hardware, they just can't modify the search settings at install time. The user can do whatever they want with the search settings, and it's a full 8.1 install from a technical viewpoint.
Basically, the difference in price between the two SKUs is purely hardware based. So, buy whichever hardware you need, and install GNU/Linux.
On a side note, I have an HP Stream 7 tablet with an Atom CPU and 1GB RAM, and it runs 8.1 very well. I'd imagine even the lower spec SKU of the Intel stick would run it fine. Storage space would be the only real issue for that OS.
I wonder how big the gap is now. It would be interesting to see some benchmarks comparing Windows 8.1 with Bing (where the 32-bit version runs in 1GB) with an equivalent full-spec Linux.
That's a good point, the recent push by Microsoft towards mobile devices has undoubtedly led to significant improvements. Without some hard data I am certainly being speculative, just speaking from experience.
I don't know, but since its form-factor and size puts in direct contention with Android Sticks (which go for about 60$), it should be priced similarly. Also it has to be cheaper than the cheapest Celeron-based Intel NUC(140$). So i expect the price should be somewhere in between.
