School has started again, and there's been the usual rush of shopping and preparing, but we're now considering a surprisingly difficult question: does our daughter, who's just entering high school, need her own computer, and if so, what should it be?

You’d think that after a couple of decades of chatter about the importance of computers in education, you'd be able to buy an inexpensive machine optimised for the needs of students. In particular, you'd think that Apple would have a good entry-level offering. But you'd be wrong.

Our daughter has a cellphone, which she of course uses constantly for everything other than making phone calls: texting, taking pictures and videos, listening to music, playing games. She's not all that anxious about the computer question, but she does need something to write her school papers with and to use for research on the web.

She's going to have to pay for at least part of the computer herself, and her approach so far has been "I just want whatever is cheapest." But as a long-time Mac user who is going to be the default trouble-shooter, I'm pushing her to think about a Mac laptop. Or at least I was, until I checked the prices.

The cheapest MacBook these days costs about $1100 (£699 in the UK), and then there is the not-so-optional AppleCare service plan for $250 (£199 in the UK) more. You don't have to get AppleCare, but if you don't you get essentially no service whatsoever (even if it's still under warranty), which seems especially unwise when kids are involved. We don't have sales tax in Montana, but we're still talking $1350, plus a printer, plus some software (Microsoft Office is still hard to avoid) – a lot of money for something that will mainly be used as a typewriter with built-in web browser.

The non-Mac laptops are considerably cheaper, but still not all that cheap, especially after you figure in the service plan and the anti-virus software and such that you need. It looks like around $1,000 for a reasonable Dell or HP laptop.

My point here is not that these products aren't worth the money; the technology that you get for the price is incredible. Yet for reasons that are not totally clear to me, it's somehow not in the business interest of the big tech-industry players to create a cheap, simple general-purpose computer.

The difficult history of the One Laptop Per Child program, aimed at creating a $100 PC for the developing world, is illustrative. Long story short, key industry players such as Intel fear that such a machine could damage the market for full-priced products, and therefore their support for the program has been less than wholehearted.

There are parallels to this in other industries. Automakers don't like building small, cheap cars, because they make more money on big, expensive cars. (This attitude has arguably been the downfall of the US auto industry – something computer-makers might want to consider.)

But the personal computer business has been exceptional in its ability to maintain essentially the same prices even as the cost of the technology plummets in accordance with Moore's Law. You get much better technology in the box, but the box still costs around $1500 – only a little less than what I paid for my first PC 20 years ago.

My wife bought an old iMac at a garage sale recently for $25. The machine runs just fine, and only seven or eight years ago it was state-of-the-art. But since it uses OS 9 (and didn't have enough memory for OS X), it's almost impossible to find the hardware and software needed to get it connected to the net via DSL. It's probably possible, but I couldn't figure it out, and thus we had a very high-tech doorstop that we later sold at our own garage sale.

It's in the interest of everyone in the computer industry to keep the product cycles evolving fast enough that you need new gear every few years. Fancier software requires fancier hardware, which in turn enables fancier software. As a web publisher, I can appreciate the advantages of the latest and greatest, and from that vantage point the faster people upgrade the better (supporting old web browsers is a large headache for everyone in this business).

As a consumer, though, I'm disappointed with the lack of choices. Surely someone could make money on a simple, durable, $600 student laptop with a three-year warranty. Any takers?

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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