Reliance Jio, owned by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, is in talks with laptop manufacturers like HP, Acer, Lenovo, and others to launch an INR 15,000 (SLR 59,750) laptop in coming months that will bring down the ownership cost drastically, Economic Times said.
The report suggests Jio will be able to keep the cost of the laptop low as it will be powered by the ‘cloud’ and the device will just be a dumb terminal. This means that the processing and storage of the laptop will take place on Jio Cloud, a cloud computing service offered by Reliance Jio. This will allow users to get access to computing at a way lower cost, paving the way for Mukesh Ambani to reach first-time laptop buyers and educational institutions. Jio Cloud comes in a subscription model and multiple subscriptions can be accessed on a single laptop. As per the report, the company has already started to conduct trials for the same on HP Chromebook.
The laptop and tablet market size in India is currently estimated to be around USD 6 billion.
