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Laptop Makers Skeptical of $100 Laptop Schedule
coolgadget wrote to mention an article at DigitalTimes reporting that the production schedule MIT has laid out for the $100 laptop may be unrealistic. From the article: "Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, and Inventec, which are reportedly bidding to manufacture the world's cheapest notebook distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives, consider that meeting the volume shipment schedule for the US$100 notebook would be 'unlikely' given the current technical hurdles that need to be overcome ... The OLPC project will need huge support from governments to solve a variety of software and hardware problems including handwriting recognition, translation, and panel issues, all under a low-cost production budget, Taiwan notebook makers stated. Related components for the low-cost notebooks are still in the design stage, indicated the makers, noting that a 7.5-inch display sample for the US$100 model could be released by January of next year at the soonest." We've previously discussed this story.
I believe It's Red Hat. I was announced on Slashdot a few weeks ago, iirc.
If I remember right, it's a version of Red Hat. I'm just wondering what desktop they would run. Performance of Gnome or KDE sucks on most $1000+ laptops, hate to imagine it running on a $100 laptop.
This isn't aimed at the US market, it is aimed at the developing world. In places where teachers are rare, it would be useful to provide basic numeracy and litteracy teaching - then when these children grow up they can contribute more to their local economy. If they get some kind of Internet access (maybe a satellite link per village?) their parents can check check the price of their stock / crops at the nearest settlements, and find out whether they should take go east or west to get the best price.
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I believe the idea is to make this laptop available to developed countries for about $200 to help subsidize the $100 to under developed and developing counties. I like that idea and would buy one just to help out.
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Basically the wireless is there because otherwise the laptop would be useless. Each laptop will have a very small and cheap hard drive (or flash memory?), and won't store much information. Instead, students will be able to share files easily, and the teacher will be able to send information to the students, without the need for expensive hardwired infrastructure. It also makes the "classroom" very portable.
I'd dispute that... Have you ever tried to draw a Chinese character? Basic day-to-day use characters are about 1000, and English has 26 characters. The Chinese has used touch-pad for Chinese character hand-writing for YEARS (the same software can also do English/Numeric/Symbols/Japanese/Korean). I've owned one for 5 years+. Have you seen those business card scanner?
It was on the UNDP booth. The thing was made out of balsa wood, with a photo where the LCD display would one day sit. It clearly was nothing more than a mock up.
Wow there, I don't think the approximately three billion people who live their lives on under 2 dollars would agree with you on that. I do think that people who are living in extreme poverty should receive education, information, and the technology associated with them to permanently lift them out of poverty. Food and medicine alone can't do it. However, those three billion people really couldn't care less about surfing the 'net
These people really need such things as:
That's only a short list of what needs must be met. More information is available at Poverty Facts and Stats.
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If a $100 laptop was possible, some bottom feeder like Wal-Mart would already be selling it. As is, we have people beating each other up in big box stores all across the nation to get a $400 loss leader laptop.
That's because all mainstream laptops have hard drives, expensive monitors, expensive processors which generate heat that is expensive to cool, and more than 128 MB of RAM because they have to run Windows XP. Have you actually looked at the specs of this laptop and compared it to anything on the market? They don't compare.
You're forgetting that even the loss-leading walmart specials include a 12-15" screen, a hard drive, a 1GHz+ processor, a cdrom, and even an OS license cost of some sort (even if it's just Linspire or the like).
The MIT system has none of those.
Additionally, commercial laptops also have to include at least SOME type of profit for the manufacturer / retailer, otherwise there is no motive to build it. Additionally, there are typically less than a million of each model / spec produced, leading to higher development costs.
The MIT laptop is purely for educational / governmental use, and is meant to have millions of identical systems built. There's no profit motive, and the cost of manufacturing eventually goes down.
These manufactures don't care about the end price of the laptop. The MIT lab designed the project with the intent that manufacturers could profitably build them for a reasonable price. The manufacturers aren't saying that it won't happen because they won't make enough money, but because they don't have enough time.
My personal experience is that academics do not fully appreciate the amount of time and work required to make something that works in theory work in the real world. When products are brought to market, it is usually the result of years of planning, design, and development (even in the computer industry). Most academics seem to think that once the concept is developed, most of the work is done, but in reality that is a very small part of the overall process. While the MIT lab has been drumming up political support for the project, they've left most of the real work to the manufacturers they plan to contract to (they've really only designed the concept). Since it is still the bidding stage for all of this work, we are really only at the very beginning of the process. The MIT lab has given an unrealistic estimate of the amount of time the project will take. Manufacturers don't care who they work for, only that they get paid.