Medison Celebrity, the $150 Laptop

Somebody must be losing money on this Medison Celebrity laptop, running Fedora Linux and certainly qualifying as the cheapest notebook in the world at $150. Heck, that’s even less expensive than the OLPC (one laptop per child) that was supposed to cost $100 and has now ballooned up past $175, and which some sources are saying will retail for between $350 and $525 and won’t be available until this coming holiday season. But this Medison Celebrity is a real notebook, with an Intel Celeron 1.5 GHz CPU, a 14-inch 1280×768 LCD screen, 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. There’s got to be a catch.Medison is a Swedish company whose spokesman can’t disclose exactly how many laptops the company will be selling at this rock-bottom $150 price. So could this be a publicity stunt, positioning the company as a philothropist that “wants everyone to be able to afford a computer?” It’s not going to do anybody much good if there are no PCs available, or if you’ll wait a year for one to be delivered.

Other companies, Acer, for one, will swoop in to compete with this, if it’s even possible. Can the age of disposable laptops be upon us? Perhaps it already is. [Medison, via Insider Weblog]