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It's no powerhouse, but then again with a $200 price tag, the Everex 'Green gPC' doesn't really need to be. Wal-Mart announced on Thursday it will start selling these ultra-cheap Linux-based PCs at 600 of its retail locations, according to the AP, as well as online.
It's not the first time the retail giant has cozied up to Linux. Wal-Mart started offering Linux computers at its online store in 2002, again, with prices hovering around $199. These computers were available for several years, but vanished from the company's inventory in 2005.
Interestingly, the variant of Linux found on the new gPC is called gOS and is derived from the popular Ubuntu. According to David Liu, the founder of gOS, the OS is heavily oriented toward Google's Web sites and online applications, like YouTube, Gmail and the company's word processing program.
The gPC's $200 price tag is also noteworthy, especially in light of a recent blog post by Fortune's managing editor, Andy Serwer. After discussing PC pricing with a few execs at Intel last month, Serwer says that, historically, the best price point for computers has been around 1/17th of the average U.S. household income. Serwer applied this to worldwide households today and found that $200 is 1/17th the income for about 1.8 billion of them. That's a lot of households, and potentially a lot of gPC buyers.
