You've heard of the $100 laptop. What about a $100 desktop? Meet Zonbu: a new computer company making desktop computers that are both extremely green and extremely cheap. Impossible, you say? Not so. They've done it by using the Product-Service-System concept. I recently had the pleasure of testing out a unit they sent me, and I have to give it a thumbs-up.
Years ago, when the internet's first wave was crashing on the shores of society, there was an enormous amount of buzz about "the Network Computer", a device that would really be all about connectivity and services rather than being an isolated, standalone machine. It never really materialized, until now. The actual Zonbu box (smaller than a Mac Mini, or thereabouts) has very little inside of it -- no hard drive, no CD or DVD drive; just a motherboard and a compact flash card. (And, enough ports for any peripherals you'd want.) The company's description of how it works:
The Zonbu device does not have a hard disk. Instead, a 4GB compact flash (similar to what digital cameras and MP3 players use) stores the operating system and the application which have been installed. The remaining space of the compact flash is used as a cache to store local copies of files you've recently used; special software keeps these copies synchronized with the online storage servers. In other words, when you need to work on a file, the file is:
1. transparently downloaded to the compact flash cache,
2. modified locally using the appropriate application such as OpenOffice, Image Workshop or Web Page Editor and,
3. promptly uploaded to the server every time you save the file.
Since all your data is stored on the Zonbu servers:
* You can access the files from any Internet-connected device using the file browser — which initially works only on Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista.
Having tried it, I can say it's seamless.
The reason that this is a greener way to compute is that it increases efficiency by sharing hardware. As we've mentioned before, having a rack of hard drives in a data center is more efficient than having lots of individual hard drives in people's homes, because you can eliminate all the unused space for data on the individual drives. In addition, having a rack of drives in a data center lets you use older, smaller, slower drives (keeping them out of the landfill) without losing performance, because such Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks) (RAID) systems let you combine several small slow drives into what becomes effectively one large fast drive.
The Zonbu system is halfway to a "thin client" system like Sun's Open Work Practice (which Sun says can use a tenth of the power and reduce raw material usage by a factor of 150.) Thin clients are also called "dumb terminals," a phrase from the old mainframe days, when computers were enormous and expensive. Instead of each user having his or her own computer, multiple users shared the one mainframe computer by accessing it via their own terminals -- a keyboard and screen, basically, with no real brains or storage in it (and thus, "dumb").
Zonbu's system isn't quite the same: it offloads data storage to a server, but still has a CPU to do the processing locally. But Zonbu's system is a fraction the cost of Sun's. The computer itself costs just $100, and computing services are covered by a monthly fee. (The prices vary by how much storage space you want.) And this is a green model economically, because it begins to decouple making money from producing physical stuff.
So how good is Zonbu's green cred? The numbers look great:
At just over two pounds, Zonbu device consumes at least four times fewer chemicals and fossil fuels during manufacturing than conventional desktop PCs.
Zonbu also has a free take-back program, which includes everything -- even the original packaging the computer came in. The company got an EPEAT Gold score, which, while not the absolute highest score in computers (that honor goes to several models of Toshiba laptop), is nonetheless excellent.
Zonbu's online green page includes a little table comparing the unit's emissions to those of a "normal" computer. I'm not convinced by it -- at 175 watts, the estimation of normal is very high-wattage (for comparison, my Mac laptop uses about 30 watts unless it's really cranking away, and that includes the LCD screen, while presumably Zonbu's table just counts the power used by the box itself). But even if the efficiency is increased by only 50 percent, or a factor of two, that would still be something to be proud of. Plus, Zonbu offsets its carbon emissions through Climate Trust, hopefully rendering both production and use climate-neutral.
Zonbu is a Linux-based system -- but a nice Linux that's easy to use, with a clean Windows-like interface. It even auto-generates keyboard shortcuts for every menu item everywhere, the one thing that Windows does better than the Mac operating system. It also comes with a whole slew of productivity software, based on Open Office: word processor, presentation, spreadsheet, database, finance manager, drawing, equation editor, webpage editor, desktop publisher. Basically everything that most people need, and more. All of this is compatible with Microsoft Office, according to my quick tests. While the programs have a few bugs, for the most part they work well -- you can get things done with them. (And, unsurprisingly, they do some things better than Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc.)
There are also several games. The one I was interested in, Tron, crashed constantly, but hey, the Zonbu system is still in beta. The work-related programs worked, and that's the important part.
The OS even has a couple quirky little features: emblems instead of label-colors for marking files, and a "select by pattern" function to get to a group of files at once. Since the OS is read-only, it should have excellent security and virus-resistance. And to round things out, because the data storage is all server-side, it can be automatically backed up every day.
As for style, Zonbu has a skinnable case with over a dozen designs to choose from. It would be nice to lose the aluminum fins all over the sides in favor of a sleeker, Mac Mini-like look, but hey -- give the company time.
All in all, the Zonbu is both green and cheap, and it should satisfy the needs of the 90 percent of computer users who don't use super-fancy engineering software or other specialty tools. It would also be a good first computer for someone who isn't tech-savvy -- something I've never been able to say about a Linux box before, or even about the $100 laptop.
