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."
Umm.. I never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor.
What a strange time we live in.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But could a Beowulf cluster of these beat a $100 laptop?
I've always thought having a monitor that could detach to be stand-alone or attach with a standard mount would greatly help consumers. It wouldn't be too good for the manufacturers, who generally charge more for a replacement screen than a newer laptop would cost.
With these gov't subsidized deals, though, I'm hopeful.
It should help out by decreasing replacement costs (swap the main unit OR the screen, not both).
Meanwhile, I can't wait to see these Indian cheapies on eBay!
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I hope these could be sold in the states if they are made, lots of kids in the poorer southern states could benefit. Hell, anyone could benefit from a low cost multipurpose laptop!
:( )
I bought a TI extensa for $25 and it's 100 MHz with 8 MB RAM and it lasted me through high school, and part of college (the DC jack broke and my wireless PC card broke too
If they could make this low cost laptop like the TI Extensa 710 (with a faster clock and more RAM of course) I think we'd find a low-cost solution. Perhaps some old technology chips could be made again for a low cost.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
That's nothing, at the current rate I fully expect Thailand (and other developing southern Asian countries) to hit back with a $1.00 laptop, with wireless, and wikipedia, openoffice (running really fast), and even Duke Nukem Forever
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
There is absolutely no information to be found here... Without some specs for the thing, they might as well say they're coming up with a toaster...
If all you want is an digital text reader and work processor, yeah, you can do it for $10, easily enough. It's not going to compete in the same league as the OLPC, though.
Adding a color screen drives prices through the roof. Adding wifi will be more expensive. Adding USB and a decent amount of Flash storage will make it more expensive... etc.
I've argued several times before that the OLPC could do it's job just fine with far lower spec than even what it originally had, but I doubt they've got it right this time, at a price of just $10, and I'm extremely sure a device that cheap can't reasonably even be called a "Laptop" to begin with.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I wonder if tech support will be outsourced to India?
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
Avery body here is aware of a project called Simputer, that was being run by IISc, Bangalore some 5 years ago. That project also had aim of providing computer at about Rs 5000 (@100 USD at rough rate of 50 Rs/USD). It turned out to be a huge failure.
This seems to be another vapour ware project, whose main aim is to extract government money. A present even simple mouse costs more than Rs. 500.
There is a saying in Sanskrit vachanesu kim dardratam . Why should you act as poor if only thing you have to do is to make promise. You can promise Rs 5.0 laptop, if you know that nobody is going to held you accountable at end of 5 year project and spending million dollar, and delivering nothing.
GoplaGiven the rate at which the dollar is falling and the time it takes to complete govt projects in India by the time it is finished Rs 1600 will be worth more than 100 dollar. They can still claim to make a Rs 1600 laptop but it would actually be a 100 dollar laptop not a 10 dollar laptop. On the flip side the Chinese flat screen Tvs we get for 400 dollars nowadays will cost us 4000 dollars at Walmart
**Life is too short to be serious**
Did IISc hire some US returned scientists? People in US academia have been playing this game of overpromising and underdelivering for a long long time.
**Life is too short to be serious**
E.g. what kind of screen will it have? Even PDA screens are more expensive than 10$. Is it a 8x50 array of LEDs?
There is NO WAY in which a laptop can cost only $10, unless it is heavily subsidised by the state. Idian labour is cheap, but not THAT cheap (it's more expensive then china, for instance). Mass production will make things cheaper, but not THAT much cheaper (the raw materials and manufacturing still has a bottom price, after all).
If they're ever going to create something that goes below the $20 it would be amazing enough, but even then it would be a (technological) marginal device and completely out of the league with even the OLPC. Maybe some sort of ultra-cheap non-expandable motherboard with an integrated 386-like CPU, a solid-state HD of 128MB and with a 3 inch screen, or something, just to run a simplified Word application and a lynx-based browser.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
It's a pad of paper and a really nice pencil.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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, $10 seems awfully low.
*sigh*
Aniruddha Shankar
Very impressive, Your father wasn't oil minister of somewhere, was he?
Fundamental flaw with your plan: making Y lower than X.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
And so begins the Ten-Laptops-Per-Child campaign
I only mod funny =D
That's also what people have said about the OLPC when it was announced.
Several year later it managed to provide prototypes at ~150$ 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 ]
Most Indian villages which dont have grid power , have either solar , wind or most commonly biogas plants. As cows are there in most villages its easy to get methane from cow dung and generators running on methane
**Life is too short to be serious**
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 money to be made from users of the cut-down Windows would likely be negligible compared to the profit made from locking in a society to Windows.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"That's also what people have said about the OLPC when it was announced."
Not true, at least not by people knowing something of IT/computers. By the time they proposed their OLPC project, there were already desktops on the market selling at $199 with better specifications (and a HD of 30GB) - though without screen, granted, but a 7,5 inch screen is not very expensive. It is fully in the realm of the possible to create a laptop with less good specifications for $145, and indeed, with mass-production even just under $100. It is impossible, however, to go below the marginal costs of a product (and still remain in business), which, for the OLPC, can be estimated to be around $80-$90 (thus; even with large volumes). The moment they will say that such an OLPC-device with the current specs will be sold for less then 80 bucks, I will call that an impossibilty too, and rightfully so. The only way that would be possible is if *completely* new, dirt cheap production-methods and materials are used, which is doubtful to happen in the next two years (which is the timeframe of the OLPC to be mass-produced and the indian-made one to be developed).
While it is always dangerous to predict long term technological development, especially in IT, I am willing to wager that anything produced for $10 in two years time, will not be worth the name 'laptop'. At most, it will be a worthless PDA-like device, with abhorent specs, probably worse than what I described in my former post - and even then the batteries won't be included. Let's not forget India already tried to make a home-made 'dirt-cheap' computer for $100...and it flopped miserably. And now they're going to make one for $10? Yeah right.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Ever used computer with less than megabyte of ram? I have.
Ever used computer with less than megabyte of persistent storage? I have.
Now lets talk about silicon costs.
Putting few megabytes of ram, all periphelia controllers and tiny CPU, and some flash [non-compatible, designed locally to avoid IP issues], could be put on 3$ chip.
Thats right, computer as powerfull as early 90's computer could be build in single really cheap chip.
No it won't run quake 2. Perhaps you could port first quake for it though.
©God
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
Airbus is a prime example
"We're going to make the biggest, fastest, dreamiest jet in the world, and it'll be the cheapest jet money can buy!!!!!"
"Oh, by the way, oh pretty please can we have $5 billion in free money to build it with? Thanks citizens of Europe!!!"
Here's a table (sortable, now!) which ranks nations by level of income inequality; this isn't a perfect metric, since (for instance) wealth inequality tends to be far more dramatic, and a nation with high inequality but a high minimum standard of living may have fewer people in misery than a nation with low inequality, but a low average standard of living.
That said, Bolivia leads the "richest 10%/poorest 10% ratio" category, at 168.1:1 (USA: 15.9:1); Sierra Leone leads "richest 20%/poorest 20% ratio" at 57.6:1 (USA: 8.4:1); Namibia has the highest Gini coefficient, 74.3 as calculated by the UN, 70.7 by the CIA (USA: 40.8, 45). Of course, some of this data goes back to 1989, so take it with a grain of salt. The least unequal countries based on these metrics are, respectively, Azerbaijan (3.3), Azerbaijan (2.6) and Denmark (24.7, 23.2).
There's also a measure of the proportion of the population living in poverty, both in absolute (in Nigeria, about 90% of the population lives on under $2 a day) and relative (in Liberia, 80% of the population is below the poverty line) terms.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca