Netpliance i-Opener

» see netpliance.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in november 1999 i was fifteen, on ttnet dial-up at home in ankara, and the idea of a $99 internet device with a free modem and a subscription would have read as science fiction. the i-opener was a us product built around a us isp business model. neither the device nor the model ever crossed the atlantic in any meaningful way. what we got in turkey instead was an isp price war and used pentium 2 desktops at the same general price tier.

inside the i-opener was a 180mhz winchip socket-7 pc with 16mb of sandisk flash, a softmodem, and qnx neutrino doing the work underneath the netpliance shell. ken segler in las vegas opened one in early 2000 and posted the spec. the linux community spent the next eighteen months turning the i-opener into the cheapest non-laptop pc on the secondary market. people put debian on it, people put windows 98 on it. some soldered ide cables onto the board to add hard drives, sometimes drilling holes in the plastic case to fit a 3.5-inch drive. it was the original "right to root the device you bought" moment, six years before the iphone jailbreak.

netpliance tried to stop it. first they wrote a new bios that ignored hard drives, then they epoxied the bios chip into its socket so it could not be reflashed. the cuts kept escalating until they were clipping ide pins clean off at the factory. each change bought a week or two of margin. by july 2000 the company had given up on the loss-leader pricing and raised the unit cost to $400, at which point sales stopped almost entirely. netpliance pivoted to network security as tippingpoint, and the i-opener division was wound down in january 2002.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hardware ~

the spec sheet is the reason the whole story happened. inside was a socket 7 motherboard with an idt winchip c6 running at 180mhz. 32mb of ram, a cyrix media gxi chipset, a softmodem and a 16mb sandisk doc flash module pretending to be a hard drive. qnx neutrino ran underneath the netpliance ui. anyone who had ever assembled a pc could read the spec and know what was inside the box before they bought one. that was netpliance's first mistake, building a real pc and trying to keep it locked.

~ how netpliance fought back ~

the response was a sequence of hardware revisions. one version flipped the ide pins so a standard cable would not work. another epoxied the bios chip into its socket so it could not be reflashed without destroying the board. the changes kept escalating until they were clipping ide pins clean off at the factory. each change bought a few weeks of margin against the hack community, then the next workaround would be posted to slashdot or the i-opener hack sites. by july 2000 the unit price was up to $400 and the loss-leader model was dead, because every $99 box sold was going to a hobbyist who would never start the subscription.

~ what got buried with it ~

netpliance the company kept going. it rebranded as tippingpoint, was acquired by 3com in 2005, ended up inside hp in 2010 and finally inside trend micro in 2015. the i-opener brand itself died quietly in january 2002. what got buried with it was a whole category, the $99 dedicated kitchen-internet box. webtv had tried it from the tv side, 3com audrey had tried it from the touchscreen side. every entry in that brief 1999-2002 wave ended the same way. broadband and the always-on cellphone made the dedicated appliance pointless inside three years.

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