A Litl ReduxA Litl Redux

After my Thursday column about the litl, readers pointed my attention to a blog post where the folks at litl (all lowercase) further defended their reasons for its rather top-heavy $700 price point. I went in expecting some real meat for discussion. I came away with a nearly empty plate.

My biggest complaints about the litl are simple enough. It's too much money for too little machine, and too easily outgunned in its price class by commodity PCs that do far more. The blog post attempts to explain why the pricetag is high, starting with the screen:

First off, most of the comparisons people are apt to draw are not going to be with other netbooks per se, but with other computers in the same price class. Many of those machines have displays that are at least as big, if not bigger. My own $899-or-so Sony Vaio has a 15"+ widescreen display. (Also, if one of the big draws of the litl is plugging it into an HDMI TV to show photos, then the size of the screen isn't terribly relevant there.)

Then there's the support and maintenance question:

True, and very laudable. The problem is that this comes at the cost of the machine running a very deliberately restricted set of software. This isn't a bad plan -- pace the iPhone -- but the iPhone has a user culture and a hardware maker behind it that help offset the steep pricetag. litl doesn't -- not yet, anyway -- and such things are next to impossible to conjure up our of thin air.

Most netbooks don't provide such services because they're free for the taking or dirt cheap: Mozy, for instance, if you're talking about data backup. Such things may not be directly integrated with the system by default, but that's a red herring: few people expect to shell out for those things ahead of time because they're trivially simple to add.

Then comes the local storage issue. This one, I fear, had me rolling my eyes.

Last I checked, user error was the number one point of failure in most computers, with users unthinkingly running as administrator being a big part of that. Hardware failure comes in a distant second or third, depending on how you add it up. The last time a hard drive blew up on me was more than six years ago, but I've mistakenly torched my own data more times than I can count. (Thank goodness for backups). Leaving out a hard drive on the grounds that it's an invitation to disaster is like never coming out of your house because that's a fine way to get struck by lightning.

People shop for computers by price and budget, not exclusively by functionality. Most people are not going to look at the litl and make any comparisons to netbooks at all; they're going to compare it to full-blown notebooks costing about as much. And they're going to find it severely wanting.

I like the way the litl leverages open source, which is a big part of what got me curious about it. But leveraging open source doesn't make up for a really badly thought-out marketing plan, or a pricetag that simply doesn't reflect real-world need and use.

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