There are probably many reasons, one of them being support. I can see how Sun's intent for this device was mainly for the community and would like to keep it as far from reach from enterprises who aren't already experimenting with OS internally for the time being (and likely a long time as Sun is a hardware company they their own lines of servers and workstations but hasn't decided to roll out their own notebook (and don't bring up the re-branded Tadpole one sold a few years back)).
Picture time: A company using portable SPARC workstations from Tadpole sees an ad on sun.com for an M10 at 1,099, knows its not SPARC but is also being motivated to cut costs sharply with the looming economic conditions. Said IT manager saves the day by purchasing 10,000 devices to roll out to the oil fields knowning they come with 3 years of hardware support and 1 year of Sun support (that Sun doesn't intend any of us to actually use, maybe a few calls here or there but since we are a part of the community or a company that uses Sun products and are experimenting it makes sense). Sun is not going to make much money here at all needing to support these devices with such a small margin of revenue generated per device and we need them to make money to continue development on our beloved OS. I hope this isn't just a market test and they do in fact continue to offer us new notebooks at great prices, certified for OS. That said, I am sitting here typing this message on my Toshiba M10 from Sun rocking svn_118. On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 6:37 AM, Dave Koelmeyer<[email protected]> wrote: > Good question... > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
