bare bones system - technical definition

A computer system that has no frills. It contains the minimum number of components required to be a self-contained system that will run common applications and nothing more. For example, the optical drive may be a plain CD-ROM that has no recording or writing capability, and memory may start at 256MB, which is not sufficient for a lot of today's software. The unit may contain a built-in speaker or have mediocre external speakers. The fact that it may have more computing power than the entire United States had in 1940 is beside the point!