4.5 years ago, i made a little bet with david rothman -- who i pleasantly refer to as "the idiot", inspired by a label given by another observer on the e-book scene -- about my 5-year perspective on e-book hardware... you can find the original thread here:
http://www.teleread.com/2005/11/29/you-can-buy-the-mit-100-laptop-for-200/ as usual, for him, the idiot was blathering on about how there'd be $50 e-book hardware "real soon now", a line he'd been huckstering for years prior to that... i always reminded him that an e-book reader-machine would have to have a chip and a screen, and that meant that it would essentially be a computer, and that those were the most expensive parts of any computer, so that it was totally unrealistic to expect that kind of pricing... i said:
and if there’s a $50 computer — i mean a real computer – available on _any_ thanksgiving in the next 5 years, i will _buy_it_ for you. because the cost of _lunch_ will hit $50 before there is a $50 computer. and i can buy you lunch…
4.5 years later, there's still no $50 computer on the market. so it looks like the idiot's crystal ball was severely cracked... but walmart _will_ be selling the iphone (a real computer) for just 99 bucks. so my crystal ball? pretty darn accurate. -bowerbird