In a nutshell: A London company called Pentaform is planning to start selling a biodegradable keyboard that can run Windows 10 for just $150 later this month. It created the system, branded AbacusBasic, to help connect people that otherwise couldn’t afford a computer to the internet.
According to Pentaform, the Abacus is the most affordable computer in the world. It’s a regular office keyboard with a trackpad tacked onto the side and a quad-core system tucked underneath it. It doesn’t have a screen, but it has an HDMI port.
Part of what makes it special is its environmental friendliness. Pentaform co-founder, Joon Sang Lee, says the Abacus “considers the planet as one of its prime beneficiaries.” Its outer casing is made from a biodegradable polymer and its interior components are designed to be repairable and recyclable.
Pentaform says that the Abacus consumes just 31 kWh per year, about the same as a lightbulb. It makes sense, given that the quad-core from 2016 it uses, the Intel Atom x5-Z8350, has an SDP (scenario design power) of just 2 W.
Despite its low power consumption, the Atom manages a base clock of 1.44 GHz and a boost clock of 1.84 GHz. It sounds slow, but I’ve used that processor before and, as Pentaform claims, it’s fine for simple tasks like web browsing.