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OLPC Cost Rises To $188 Per Laptop
Arathon writes "The amazing '$100 laptop' designed by the 'One Laptop Per Child' program isn't going to make it out the door for that price. CNN reports that the laptops are now expected to cost $188 apiece when they come out later this fall. This is expected to make the program's appeal potentially much smaller, since the developers were relying on the mind-bogglingly low-price to hook governments into the concept of buying laptops for their people. OLPC's spokesman guarantees that the price won't rise further, to 'above $190'. The price differential is being blamed on raw materials costs and currency fluctuation. Is this the end of the OLPC's newsworthiness, or should we continue to hope that it will make the difference that so many have said it will?"
In 6 months it will still be a very useful machine and be a lot cheaper.
-- Cheers!
Come on now. "currency fluctuation" refers to the US dollar sinking.
That's not going to matter in Argintina, Brazil, Nigeria (well maybe there...), and so on.
Yes, $188 is almost twice the $100 original cost. $100 was the goal, right? Even though OLPC didn't make its goal, $188 is still a ridiculously cheap laptop--no other manufacturer can match that (if they could, they'd be making it)--that will be benefiting people throughout the globe.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
At that price, one might as well get an Asus EEE instead. Unless Asus is also raising prices...
It's okay, it's 188 USD, not 188 in some highly valued currency.
Be relentless!
0.532 Laptops Per Child
According to Google Calculator
188 U.S. dollars = 92.7204577 British pounds
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
It's OLPC's recent goal of being operating system agnostic, rather than linux specific. We know that specially tailored linux distributions can run on very old (and very cheap) hardware, but Windows and OSX can't. If the goal is to be able to run any operating system, then the specs have to be pretty recent, and that means more expensive hardware.
The issue is that OLPC are pressured into running Windows by American and other rich Western schools that like the idea of buying a cheap PC and don't care that much if the price is $100 or $190 as a result.
$90 is 90 days pay for poor people who live on $1 a day. In those countries, the governments will never buy massive numbers of OLPCs, and at $190 a pop they'll even buy a whole lot less of them.
I'm pretty sure that "pay twice the price thing" has no official basis and was just a petition someone started.
Also, while I'm certainly going to snap up an ASUS Eee - it looks like an awesome little subnotebook, especially since laptops that size are usually only available as fancy $2000 machines - I'd also buy an OLPC if I got the chance. Being cheap is about the only thing they have in common.
The ASUS Eee is light and has a tiny screen (even for a subnotebook) and a 3 hour battery life, while the OLPC is a rugged machine with sunlight-readable display and a hand charger.
> Currency "fluctuation", a.k.a. inflation
Currency fluctuation doesn't refer to inflation, but to the low exchange rate for dollar
> may raise this by $5 tops
The dollar has dropped 10% in value compared to second largest currency (the EURO) since the announcement of the OLPC.
"We know that specially tailored linux distributions can run on very old (and very cheap) hardware, but Windows and OSX can't."
The OLPC has 256 MB of ram, and 1GB of flash memory. It can't run either of those operating systems. If they were trying to make it run these operating systems, they did a really poor job.
"The issue is that OLPC are pressured into running Windows by American and other rich Western schools that like the idea of buying a cheap PC and don't care that much if the price is $100 or $190 as a result."
That is speculation and it probably isn't true. I'd doubt reducing the hardware specs would make the laptop any cheaper. It just costs a certain amount to money to put a laptop together, and there's no amount of spec and feature reduction that can change that. The truth is that OLPC was largely unaware of the difficulties this kind of project would face. OLPC set an unreasonable goal for the price, and now they're coming to terms with the reality of the situation. Initially OLPC had said that the market wouldn't produce an inexpensive laptop because the profits weren't there. It turns out that the market wasn't making them because it's not possible.
I'm getting paranoid too, since the quality has dropped so much in the last few years.
Notice that complaints are all getting marked down?
We're being punished for noticing.
If they're going to keep straying from their original vision, they should at least have the decency to call it "No Laptop Left Behind."
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Apple should release a $200 iPod touch with increased functionality and reduced specs for children in third world countries. It could easily compete with OLPC at that price.
Isn't that kind of heavy for a laptop?
Oh wait... Never mind.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
"How about 256 flash and 32MB ram"
How much do you think the 1GB flash and 256MB or ram are adding to the cost of this machine? I could buy them (not in bulk) for about $30. Do you honesty think it would be appreciably cheaper to use 256 and 32? It would cost a few dollars less at most (the cost of ram is not proportional to the amount purchased, as ram must be built in modules), and dramatically limit the functionality of the machine.
"One of the nice things with older hardware is that the factories already have everything in place to produce it."
No, in the case of 32MB ram chips, the factories are not set up to produce it at all, because no one uses it. They've all moved on the more modern, cost effective technologies. Moreover the majority of the cost here is coming from the actual cost of assembling the machine. The ram and flash memory are inexpensive.
The price of the OLPC laptop is becoming a recurring subject. I think the price of the laptops is important, but not the most important story to tell. The OLPC laptop has already revolutionized the design of the laptop. On the hardware side we have the extreme power efficiency, the high resolution screen, the cranking mechanism, and last but not least the ergonomic, rugged design. On the software side there is the open firmware, the mesh network, the new user interface, Bitfrost, and probably a few other things I forgot. And all of this is made possible by open source software. The OLPC laptop has set a new standard, and none of the so called competitors from Intel, or other manufacturers comes even close. The competing machines are just cheap standard laptops, with none of the qualities that make the OLPC laptop special. Whatever the price of the laptop, and even if the whole project ultimately fails, the design of the OLPC laptop will have an enormous impact on the future of the PC. And because it is all open souce we can build on its foundations. All of that is much more important than todays price of the hardware.
Of course this is bad news. And I don't know how most countries are going to react to this. But I still plan to buy the OLPC for myself. It's a completely open platform, a portable and rugged design and I will support a good cause when I buy it.
Let's be economically realistic here. If you look at the OLPC progress timescale here:
http://laptop.org/en/vision/progress/index.shtml
You will notice that the price tag of 100$ per laptop initiates back in the end of 2004.
Now, I hope all of you here have heard about an economic phenomenon called inflation - the process where governments inflate money supply making your dollars buy less. Very few know that for the past decade or so the government has been massaging the official inflation numbers to make them appear lower - this allows them to make fewer and fewer payments on inflation adjusted liabilities such as social security. However, they still publish all the numbers one needs to calculate the actual inflation, and some people have been doing that, look for example here:
http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data
Notice how inflation has been running steadily at about 10% for the last few years. Today, the engineers who drafted the 100$ plan in the end of 2004 / beginning of 2005, should expect the cost to be 100*1.1*1.1*1.1 or roughly 135 dollars.
That already would take a lot of sensationalism out of the story. However, let's not stop here. Remember, the real culprit behind inflation is the money supply, and consumer inflation is usually the latest to price rising party. The money supply (as you may have noticed from previous link) has been running at 14% annually, causing serious mischief in prices of things like energy (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/energy/index.htm) or metals (http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/metals/welcome_to_the_page_about_copper_futures.htm) - both are important for making technology.
Just for the sake of an example, let's trivialize the problem a little, and say that to make a laptop you need to spend 60% of your budget on metals, and 40% on energy (it's wrong, but I am just making an example). What would you expect to happen to the price of such laptop according the charts I linked to? Well, it would go up from 100$ to slightly over 200$.
So what is the real story here, engineers screwing up their designs, or governments inflating away the buying power of the dollar making the same thing cost twice more over 3 years?
Look at my links, do your research, decide for yourself.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
This has been known for a while. Their plan is to release it now cause they finally decided to go with features rather than cost. It still has a hard drive cranks for when power is unavailable. It has a bunch of design goals that are NOT the same as other cheap laptops. It's meant to be rugged, water resistant, wireless that can span miles to provide (very slow) internet in places that wouldn't otherwise support it.
They already have a bunch of orders for other countries that are buying millions. Their plan is to let the price drop now that hardware is set in stone.
Just have to remember that you're getting a much different machine when buying one of these then buying a 300 dollar computer with monitor.
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I believe the thought is that the previous attempts to provide infrastructure, hospitals and contraception have done little to impact the overall situation in Africa.
This attempt attempts to provide access to education and communication, with the thought that a better educated populace that has access to communication and technology would be able to improve their own quality of life.
Kind of like the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" adage. Plus, giving a community contraception and hospitals are really consumables. Education, once given, can't be taken away.
Note the word "and" used in "on raw materials cost and currency fluctuation." Typically, this means that it is a combination of the two.
For example, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich contains both peanut butter, as well as jelly.