Slashdot Mirror
India Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality
sas-dot writes "We all know Nicholas Negroponte's $100 OLPC. India, which was a potential market, rejected it. India's Human Resources Development ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project. So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labor charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops."
I have to say
a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.
b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.
c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.
d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?
e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.
*sigh*
Aniruddha Shankar
I'm citing what I kept in mind from going through lots of reports and discussions after Yunus being awarded. Even though most of the reports were overall praising, some of them showed some details about what the microcredit business is about. Yunus himself, BTW, pointed out he did not see himself as benefactor but rather as businessman, which I do not take to be meant as a show of modesty.
That's also what people have said about the OLPC when it was announced.
Several year later it managed to provide prototypes at ~150$ ea.
If you followed the link from TFA to "India" on-line newspaper, you got those informations :
- Their planning to creat some home made special-purpose design, instead of replicating OLPC work.
Just like this helped the OLPC going from a typical Dell or PowerBook price range to something cheaper using some specially built technology, the Indian project initiator hope to create some newer custom design.
The end product may be as different from the OLPC as the OLPC was different from a regular laptop. Maybe the end product will be closer to a PDA in terms of design and specs.
- This is a very longterm project. The first planned prototype are ~45$ they hope to lower the price in the long term (just like the OLPC started at more than 100$).
- The whole stuff will be designed and produced by cheaper Indian designers / producers, whereas OLPC is an occidental colaboration (AMD, MIT and such). Except the whole stuff to get cheaper from that too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They need cheap metal or equivalent.
That would be plastic. Go have a look at the Reva sometime. Small electric car, mostly plastic panels over a minimal steel subframe. Whether it stands up to acceptable crashworthiness standards is anyones guess, however they are relatively low speed vehicles.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The Indian ones are usually quite shoddily built. I remember one, retailing for around Rs 200, in which the left parenthesis key didn't work. The general feel was quite clunky. Complex operations like integration took a hell of a lot more time on it.
I'll stick with Casio, thank you.
As someone below has pointed out, the Human Resources Development ministry hasn't put out one thing of technological repute. This laptop will probably be as bad as that calculator -- if it isn't really a wooden block, that is. After all, anything that can be placed on top of your lap could possibly be called a laptop.
They should have gone for the OLPC laptops and called it a day. It would have saved a lot more money in R&D.
>How would they be able to reduce the resources cost? - They need cheap metal or equivalent. They have one of the biggest shipbreaking yards in the world so there is the cheap metal, hardly worth selling off since it is second rate material.
--
Indias Mittal steel is the world's number one steel company, with 320,000 employees in more than 60 countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittal_Steel
Tata (the company that will build the car) is India's largest conglomerate, with revenues in 2005-06 of Rs 967,229 million (US $21.9 billion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group
Any reasonable Indian, when he comes across this story and finds the news hyperlinked to "Times of India" is sure to ignore the news and wait for information from more worthy resources. TOI, has an habit of creating all news as sensational, and some times to the point of 'formatting a misleading' news. The project could have been yet-another-cheap laptop project with no relation to any price tag or information on OLPC.
Senthil
Actually, I AM an Indian. I live in India, and I have as much faith in the government as an atheist has in God.
You may be interested to know that I don't get electricity for more than 18 hours a day in the summer months -- and that a large percentage of the population still lives in huts.
It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India. Being "poor" in the USA is a DREAM for the poor in India (or the poor in most of the world, for that matter.)
Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor". I know people living on WIC, medicaid, housing assistance, utility assistance, tuition assistance, and more. And they live as well as the middle to upper-middle class in many other countries.
I've known single-mother families of 6 who lived basically on the charity of others, and they *still* lived a lifestyle that hundreds of millions in India would LOVE to live.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
" if they are open minded with this thing, $10 *might* be acheivable.... Believe me, once upon a time I surfed the web, checked email, wrote papers, and generated spreadsheets just fine on a 486 25mhz and 4MB of ram - using a full GUI. "
This is more than a CPU issue. CPU, Ram, storage, motherboard, some kind of screen, keyboard and input device all cost $$$$. I don't believe for a second they can build a "laptop" for $10. Can you even buy a keyboard for $10? I'm talking new here, they can't build a million "used" 486 laptops. Even if you could get a brand new keyboard for $10 would you want it? How well would that work? Only half the keys would work and the other half would stick.
You can just barely purchase a brand new calculator for $10, and all that has is a few buttons, a watch battery, a one-line LCD screen, a cpu running at a few mhz and a few kilobytes of ram. Is that what they're calling a "laptop"? OH and prices aren't going to get cheaper, in 10 years it'll be even harder to get a $10 laptop because of inflation and labor costs, so this is impossible now and impossible in the future.
This is either a PR stunt or a scam.
From the article:
"The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find fault and rectify it, say sources."
Aren't calculators on a single board? They're building a large calculator, and even now the prices are at $47, 5x more than their goal of $10. A $47 oversized calculator-type "laptop" I could kinda see, but $10 isn't going to happen.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone