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$100 Laptop Repriced at $175
prostoalex writes "The $100 laptop introduced by Nicholas Negroponte as part of the One Laptop Per Child program will end up costing $175, Associated Press says. The demand for the program is apparent as 'seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white "XO" computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash.'"
Instead of:
"one laptop per child"
which are devices that hardly fit the description of "rugged"..
why aren't we going for:
"One desktop per family"?
Much easier to repair when broken, and that lends itself better to donations of old equipment.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
It's $175 now but will hopefully cost $100 by the time it's up for sale, so AP don't really have a story.
The dollar has lost so much value it's no suprise that it's going to start at $175. I think they should have called it the €100 euro laptop. I heard they expected after mass production for it go from $100 down to $50. It'll get their eventually.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I can understand the desire to get low cost computers into the hands of the underprivileged, really I do, it's an awesome goal. But I always have these nagging doubts if neutering the technology to get it to a cost they deem reasonable defeats the whole purpose. Remember when they tried to make those cheap internet appliances that grandma could use to check her email and surf the web? They had a dumbed down OS and scaled back hardware to make them cheap and simple to use, they also bombed horribly because they couldn't run any of the standard apps that a full on pc could. Same deal with webtv. So while this computer is cool how will it's usefullness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?
Best Buy is currently selling a laptop, retail!, for $399. $399 laptop
And the specs on it are actually not half bad, not as bad as you might think:
15.4" screen
1.5 ghz Via C7-M
512 ram
128 meg shared video
DVD +/- DL burner
60 GB HDD
802.11 b/g
10/100 ethernet
v.92 modem
Vista Basic
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks, scale down the screen size and maybe eliminate a few usb ports and some other stuff, mass produce it and you could have a full on pc capable of running even windows vista for probably under 300 bucks. I have to think that something like that would be much more useful, even if you bought half as many it would still be better in the long run with it's upgradeability and standards compliance. Thoughts?
I get your point. It's fun to try to kick a little Slashdot ass. But I'll take your question seriously and try to answer it.
The idea of putting a laptop in the hands of somebody who can't afford the technology is very appealing. We like it. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we want to be part of that. Look at the other posts that say they'd spend $500 to buy one for themselves if they'd also send one to the originally intended recipients. That's a very strong statement of support. If the price goes to $175... well, who can really fault us for not willing to take back that we like the idea that low cost computers are being given to people who could really really could use them.
It wouldn't matter who made the mp3 player. Nobody wants to hear about a significant price increase on a plentiful commodity like an mp3 player. There's too much competition and Microsoft, explicitly, has a long history of credibility problems with delivering on their marketing claims in their product in the first place.
Aren't there a host of things missing from Vista? Aren't we all aware that the "revolutionary" new file structure got cut and that DRM was a priority? For Microsoft, you reap what you sow.
So I reject your comparison. We're not assholes (as your suggest - or at least, not for this reason), we just want to see the OLPC thing succeed.
Fuckin' a, buddy. I'm all in favor of helping humanity, that is other humans, in any way possible, but every time someone looks to take on a humanitarian aid project they look to do it overseas.
Our schools here in the US are total shitboxes (most of them, and not as bad as those in some other countries), we have starving people just like everywhere else, homelessness is on the rise, New Orleans is still somewhere between the stone age and the 21st century, etc., etc., etc.
Keeping stuff like this out of the hands of American kids who need a little help, just to watch it all go overseas is kinda stupid. What's the worst that's going to happen? Kids will benefit from having the technology and people will realize that they don't need $2,000 laptops (with expensive operating systems and productivity suites) to look at porn and read emails, or maybe do a little homework?
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The concept and the product is actually very good but the project takes very little notice of economic realities. They should have designed two units, one slightly larger in plain black and the other in bright colours and smaller (as it is now). Sell the black unit at a premium price to raise capital and leverage the good will aspect of the product to make it a very enticing option. The internals of both laptops would be the same so it would mean they would reach a larger production scales faster thus saving a small fortune plus increasing the return on the premium unit.
India is one of the big targets for the OLPC and when it was proposed the USD was 49.something Rupees so almost 5000 rupees. Now the Dollar is 40 Rupees so the price could go upto 125 dollars and still stay under 5000 rupees. Now 5000 rupees is a very crtical psychological barrier in India and any laptop able to stay below 5000 is going to have a good chance. BTW desktops are available for 10000 rupees right now in India.
**Life is too short to be serious**
It's designed for kids and people who have never used a computer before. Umm, because I build computers for people who have never used computers before? Because a simple, easy-to-use UI would be useful for kiosk-type applications? Because I want a nongeek-friendly interface for the box hooked up to my TV?
Just because you can only see one use for a particular application, doesn't mean that that's all it's good for.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
For a person who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions in WWII to become a witch and sell his soul to corporate America is an absolute fucking shame.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The fact that it takes well over 50% more US dollars to equal an amount in euros or francs, should seriously concern people.
Yeah, Europeans should be very worried. Their stores are getting flooded by cheap american imports that local companies can not compete with under a 50% premium. Their jobs are getting outsourced to US. They are losing their import market to US companies that are able to offer a much better price. European tourists go and spend money abroad rather than investing it back into local economy.
I recommend you check out the site on the Laptop. They have done away with the desktop. The whole notion of Desktop doesn't apply, as people move between communities (sometimes to travel for goods). Also some places will effectively have only one laptop per family, or multiple families.
The laptops *desktop* is in fact a load of icons which show your position within the community of laptops. It is a very cool idea.
As for Rugged. The laptops are extremely rugged and are designed to be very portable, work without an electric power source (hand generator) and works as its own router for other laptops.
It's very hard to find mud huts in Argentina and I don't think there is a big fraction of the population living in huts in either Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Uruguay nor Rwanda. And I can promise you that if they were fixable in the field, there would be an cottage industry growing in a mattar of months.
People don't want to be locked into something, so they fix things themselves.