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The Sub-$100 Laptop?
Vollernurd writes "The BBC is carrying this article detailing Nick Negroponte's plans to deveop and distribute a sub-$100 notebook computer. It would be very basic and stripped down and be used in developing countries as a way of distributing school books and such. Interesting to see how they will cut costs. Yes, it does run Linux." You can read another slashdot story about this machine when it was discussed on Red Herring awhile ago.
I know the point of this is to be available in developing countries, but I can see this being very popular in "first-world" countries as well. (heck, I'd buy one) They may have to control how they're sold/distributed to keep the developed world from snapping them all up.
It takes a network of laptops to raise a child.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I recently bought a laptop on eBay for $109, + $17 shipping.
Toshiba K6-2 350MHZ, 48MB RAM, 3.6GB HD, 12.1 TFT screen. Nice shape and it runs Damn Small Linux quite well. I actually loaded Slackware 9 on it for kicks and it ran pretty well using Fluxbox.
So it will be a day or two's delay until you can grab one off eBay.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Um, why is using slower memory a GOOD thing?
Because it's cheaper? Cheaper is better when you're trying to reach a certain price-point.
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1. Distribute cheap Linux-based laptops to 2 billion indigent Asians
2. Extort $699 Linux license fee from each user
3. Profit!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This gets brought up a lot. Yes, those people have more pressing, more basic needs. But if you can offer them *information* which is a good commodity. The best example I heard is the the farmer who would normally take his wares to the market and haggle price. Now he can use the internet to check other local prices, and decide whether or not the trip is even worth it (and for large amounts of items, and long trips, this isn non-trivial to farmers).
People in 3rd world countries have 'basic' needs, but they also realize that there are some tools worth having. If a computer is going to cost you 5 years of income, then it's not an issue. But if you can get one relatively cheap, access to information can be extremely valuable.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Sure, picture tube built in. Very portable, only 8 kilograms, and a couple of cubic feet in size. That makes sense.
From looking at my inbox, Nigeria is populated by thousands of princes worth tens of millions of dollars each.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Looking at old PowerBooks (Pre-PowerPC), you can get several color screen PowerBooks for under $50. Many have a built in modem or Ethernet, you can run Adobe Acrobat to handle PDF's and it will also support Internet Explorer for web stuff. I am sure there are comparable Windows laptops selling for the same price or less. IMHO, we really should be making an effort to use older computers with proven hardware/software first before manufacturing newer computers for people who have never owned them before.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I believe it was somebody from Commodore (or Atari) who said that (in subject line) back in the early 80's. At the time the primary display for home computers (since it was the C-64 and Atari's...and Apples) were composite monitors and TV's. It's what everybody had.
You could...and they did build computers that were at the sweet spot of $200 bucks. People forget that Commodore sold MILLIONS of Vic-20's and C-64's
With High def capable TV's being sold (even without an HDTV tuner) and HDMI and DVI connectors on them it seems that you could do this again. Make a $200 (or less) computer with a keyboard and mouse (or maybee track pad) attached or built into it and connect it via HDMI to to a high def capable tv (HDMI also includes sound).
The manufacturer that comes out with a device like this could sell A LOT of these devices!
I have to admit that I currently hate laptops. Part of it is that they are expensive and fragile, but mainly because when someone can carry a computer about with them, it becomes "MINE" - they assume they can do whatever they want with it. I could envision using these as a mobile lab or textbook running off of a LTSP type host, but otherwise I'd be afraid at the upkeep time needed for them - even running Linux!
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
Did anyone else get a "Diamond Age" vibe when they thought about huge numbers of Chinese kids with laptops?
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
If you have ever worked in a factory or with a piece of remote instrumentation, cooling fans are the bane of your existance. They die quietly, and next thing you know you have random crashes, or worse, damaged components. And they have a great way of sucking dust, dirt, and other undesirables into the inner workings of the machine.
Plus, you save on the cost of the fan, the cost of the connector for the fan, the cost of the holes in the PCB to run the pins to supply the fan, and can chop that much more power off the requirements for the supply. You also have one less part that needs to be assembled onto the final product.
All of that can add up to a few hundred thousand dollars of savings over a production run of a few million computers.
And for the record, a textbook program is NOT all that CPU intensive. There is not rule that says you can't scale the format to the capabilities of the machine.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
For me I have a lot of family who has worked in various third-world environments helping to try to bring about a better quality of life and I'm sorry, but bringing in laptops is not going to create a big impact. Remember that in most of these areas people are not growing up to be tech's, they are simply aspiring to maintain a family and have a decent life. I just think that money for laptops can be better spent. I am not saying keep them uneducated. Books and teaching materials that are given to these areas are not expensive (like the books we need to purchase here) There are more important things that are needed to sustain life for them. Now for areas that are considered third-world, but have a decent quality of life and can use this additional technology then I say go for it. (Yes there are varying degrees of third-world nations) But there has to be the architecture in place for those laptops to be useful (e.g. Internet connectivity and or some other form of bringing in new material and uploading it to the laptops, but if they are cheap laptops then space obviously becomes an issue as well)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Because a laptop is gonna fill a hungry stomach.
What, you've been to a third world country where people go hungry? Most are agrarian economies, so food is quite easy to come by (and yes, I usually get better food in my "underdeveloped" country than here in the great USA. I come from Paraguay.).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"United Nations officials report a mysterious 50,000 percent increase in Ethiopian pr0n online...
And here's a great e-week article which asks: Where would they get the power for the laptop from? And wouldn't a cell phone offer better cost/benifit?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1759073,00. as p?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000605
The article:
"Power Politics Overshadow $100 PC Concept
February 2, 2005
By Guy Kewney
DAVOS, Switzerland--Nicholas Negroponte, wandering around this city, was trying to get people excited about the idea of a very small, very cheap PC, costing $100. A favor, if you like, for the poor countries at the World Economic Forum, from the rich.
Nothing wrong with the idea, as another delegate to the WEF (World Economic Forum) pointed out last week.
But Wenchi Chen, founder and president of VIA Technologies, knows a bit more about small, cheap PCs, perhaps, than the MIT Media lab chief, and he pinpointed the flaw in Negroponte's pitch quickly enough. It's power.
I've been amazed at how few people in the First World really understand how important it is that PCs don't chew up wattage like an elephant munching hay. We've gotten so used to having cheap energy that we honestly don't realize we are paying to charge our mobile phones.
You can cure yourself of this blindness simply enough. Check out any online store for something such as the Maxxima hand generator, and then try it. Just try generating enough charge in your cell phone for a five-minute conversation. It really isn't funny; it's hard work for little result. And so now, try to imagine generating the power to run a 75W personal computer.
Chen's point at the WEF was simple: All of the things we are hoping to harness the personal computer to depend on power. "Even if we built a nuclear power station a day for the next few years, we wouldn't have enough to drive all the PCs we're hoping to build," he warned.
Naturally, VIA has an axe to grind: It has focused its technology, as have Transmeta and ARM, on the power budget. But the days of cheap energy can't be taken for granted anymore, and within a decade, it may be that even we in the West will have to share the Third World's concern with power budgets.
Whether we can have cheap energy or not, the remote, rural communities of Africa and China don't have the sort of revenue that would let them put a computer such as the Media Center in every home. And I think that's where Negroponte's vision exposes its Achilles heel: He's said the minimum order for his $100 PC would be a million.
Next Page: Better to buy a cell phone?
As Peter Rojas pointed out sardonically enough, most poor villagers would rather buy a cell phone.
And indeed, why not? Cell phones are usually subsidized by the network operators for the text and call traffic revenue they generate. Increasingly, they have considerable local processing power--and, with the built-in camera, substantial local news-gathering ability, too. And the networks are now offering offline storage for trivial amounts.
Wenchi Chen is best known, in my part of the forest, for his mini-ITX range of motherboards which, amazingly, are forming a growing thicket of wireless mesh boxes providing rural broadband links to people who don't have ADSL or cable, and can't afford satellite. But the interesting thing for me about the low-power platform isn't just the wireless application.
Read more here about wireless mesh networking.
Rather, it's the discovery that more and more people are using these things as servers. And again, why not? It may take two or three low-power PCs to match the performance of a top-range Xeon, but the power budget is a tiny fraction.
And in a co-location center, they charge you for your heat output. And so smart guys are buying a half-dozen mini-ITX boxes and sticking them in their co-lo corner--and that's the cue for the Third World.
One machine per home may be a rich boy's dream. One machine per village, however, with mobile-phone peripheral access, is another matter. You can work out a power
You miss the point of the parent post. There are many situations where it would be nice to have a new (not refurbished computer from a thrift store--often there because several things are broken) computer that may be slightly underpowered but cheap, even in 1st World countries.
And the point here is that not only would it be useful to make available in sub-Saharan Africa or rural India, but to inner-city youth of Liverpool or Los Angeles.
As well, the point here is that you can make something like this available as a cheap commodity computer (avoid the feature bloat... this is to make a very cheap mass-produced computer), it will drive the price down even more simply due to economies of scale. Electronic components are particularly sensitive to volumes of production.
In addition to simply having these computers around at the check-out stands of your local Wal-Mart, there will be a community of developers and tinkerers that will be using the equipment...many of which could translate and port some of the tools and concepts from more expensive equipment to a very cheap platform like this.
There have been some amazing things done with some of the old 8-bit platforms, like the Comodore 64 and the Apple ][, including TCP/IP stacks and web browsers that would have been unheard of when they were originally put together.
An example of a projct made for "an initiative only making sense in desparate circumstances" that has practical application in 1st World countries, The Freeplay Wind-up Radio is one of the most innovative projects to come up. This is a device that doesn't need an external power source, is very rugged, and works in areas of the world like Rwanda or Congo. It is also sold in the USA and Canada to people who want to keep an emergency radio available during a disaster, so you don't have to constantly check and see if the batteries are working.
How come a laptop computer couldn't be any different?
Or to paraphrase your Bill Maher quote a little differently, why not go from 10 to 11 when we can also help a country go from 0 to 1? It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.