It's not a good computer, or a computer that I'd buy, but it'll let you got on ET or YouTube without a hitch.
OTOH, design life might be a problem. Because most people replace their computers every few years, they seem to have a design life of only about five years, whereas a TV's design life can easily be ten years - heck, fifteen if you're lucky.
I've never actually owned a TV, so I don't know what a cheap TV costs.
- Jake
[1] For the tower - give it another hundred for screen, keyboard and mouse. Unless you can inherit those - they usually last longer than the box they come with (my own screen and keyboard are on their third or fourth tower). If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
most people replace their computers every few years
um, no. this is fallacy brought from yon by stale corporate HW/software investment stats. turnover/upgrade has been in decline since the dot com crash -- explaining in part, for example, the conspicuous IBM exit from PC (enter Lonovo) by 2005 that complemented its lucrative syst-integration rent biz, H-P and Dell cycles of revenue shocks.
the "early adopter" segment of semiconductor/GUI market is small but very vocal: consider how often and how many column inches MSM gives "analysts." blogging environments are actually fine proxy for purchase incentives and planned obsolescence promulgated by such users... in turn explaining why commentors here have trouble imagining (1) working poor have no time for IP; (2) children of the poor are not barriers to public PC access, when extended family are primarily childcare providers, in any case, to Ideal™ parent custody.
nonetheless, like that of the passenger vehicle, the life-cycle of the desktop PC and other durables in consumer households exceeds allowed depreciation schedules by a factor of 3, easily. however, one could attribute moore's law in semi, expansive consumer credit, and kewl cross-platform entertainment/ISP functionalities (e.g. PSP, Nintendo ?!, "3G" mobile/cell) to erosion of PC replacement market. yeah, actually more people worldwide own mobile/cell than either tv or PC.
Check out this public monitor on penetration by device by region (dig): internetworldstats.com ... Asia's density has been ahead of ROW for sometime ...
OMG, mapnet is back up!!! Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
