Thanks for posting this, just picked one up. I've got the Samsung Chromebook (running crouton), which is great, but I would like to have something x86 as well...
Yep, that's not a bad value, but $30 extra is still quite significant to us, and the smallness/lightness and battery life of the Chromebooks is hard to beat.
Touché. Though, to be fair, it's hard to "accidentally" do it, as there is a subsequent confirmation screen. The problem is one of ignorance, upon first receiving the laptop, and not knowing how to boot into an operating system. Once that's been settled, then it's perfectly safe and convenient to use.
This made me think, at what scale is this project happening?
I'm guessing a lot of companies would be willing to give you discounts or perhaps even free machines (buy one, get one free?) to get the positive PR by being associated with this kind of thing.
We've currently funded 146 laptops over the last few months, but we'd love to be distributing thousands every year and are currently in conversations with a variety of companies to see if we can get sponsorships going. That would potentially allow us more flexibility around what machines we use.
You guys should work with CodeDay (http://codeday.org) and StudentRND (http://studentrnd.org) to help students at the CodeDay events learn how to code even if they don't have laptops!
Maybe sponsor one of the local events with a certain number so they can open up registration to kids who otherwise couldn't come due to the lack of a laptop.
I've heard rumors that this is the case (at least for the Acer C720), though I can't confirm it. I did call Acer to speak with a sales rep and learned that Acer's cost to produce is nearly $250 (if their information can be trusted), so it seems that someone is subsidizing the cost.
That Toshiba represents just about everything wrong with inexpensive laptops. It's large, heavy, has a terrible screen, slow HDD, poor battery life, and underpowered CPU.
