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OLPC Launches Buy One, Give One Free Program
Tha_Big_Guy23 writes "For the first time, and for a limited period only, people in North America will be able to get their hands on the XO, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's rugged little laptop that's designed specifically for children. And for each cutting-edge XO purchased in the West, another will be given to a child in a developing country. For $399, customers can order a laptop for themselves; bundled into the price is the cost of delivering a second XO to a child a poor country."
With so many other options for low cost linux based laptops coming up, how many would lap up the XOs? Yeah some geeks & some philanthropists ... the tech loving & God fearing maybe ... but will it sell like the Dells?
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
Just ordered one a few hours ago.
Nice way to help a worthy cause and not a bad deal for a years t-mobile service.
I will agree that what America has is what I could call "material prosperity". There appears to be infrastructure everywhere but people are hurting in the pockets. These days, the American dollar has also taken a hit, so everyday stuff is expensive.
For those interested, here's a link to the actual order page.
The two laptops will cost $399.00 USD, and shipping is $24.95 USD (for a total of $423.95 USD). Open to residents of US and Canada only. Paypal is the default payment option (credit cards are also accepted). Of that, $200 is considered a tax-deductible donation. Your contribution also gets you 1 year of free Wi-Fi access at T-Mobile hotspots.
The website says that they will try to deliver the laptop before the holidays, but that initial supplies are limited (TFA says 40,000 units in this first month, with 20,000 ready before Christmas), so if you're keen to get one of these things, you should order sooner rather than later.
I'm certainly curious to see how many orders get put in. If a large number of geeks buy these things as hacking toys, then they could very well become the best platform for a variety of tasks. For example, maybe this will finally be a viable e-book reader (portable, rugged, long battery life, display that can be used in ambient light, etc.). Should be interesting.
Me too! For my niece, as well. Pitty I can't get one because I don't live in the US or Canada. Pitty also for a child that has to go without laptop because of that limitation. I assume it's a) because of limited manufacturing capacities and b) logicistics. Still sucks though.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Can't I just buy one for myself and let the volume productions reduce the price for everyone?
I bet if they tried the freemarket approach they could get the retail price down to, oh I don't know, maybe 100USD. They could name it "the $100 laptop"
No? Oh ok, I'll just have to buy two Eee PCs for the same amount.
US society already has high technology. Giving a poor kid an OLPC in North America may help him or her. Giving a poor kid an OLPC in someplace where they don't have computers available at the library down the street (which the kid never goes to because his parents and peers think libraries are for geeks and morons) will help that kid interface with the modern world and help bring up the whole country.
Now, I'm not saying poor folks in developed countries brought it upon themselves, or are willfully poor, but I do think that there is greater room for improvement across populations as a whole in other places.
Considering I picked up two full-feature Acer laptops at Wally World two Fridays ago for under $350 each.
Is it guaranteed that my purchase will be matched by the delivery to a child, or am I simply throwing my money into a huge black pit, in the hopes that the number of people who buy one in the US will be the same as those delivered to children, apart from their already-planned deliveries?
Because you're supporting a cause?
Using your logic, why would I donate $100 to the Red Cross when I could just as easily get a mickey of vodka and have a good time for less!!!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First, it should be noted that OLPC is targeting developing nations where there is some momentum to improve things, but where access to technological resources and information are limiting growth. They are not focusing on the "desperately poor" countries where starvation is the overriding concern (take a look at the participating countries). Second, the XO laptops are meant to work side-by-side with other forms of relief, aid, education, and infrastructure improvement.
Saying "why bother with OLPC when people are starving?" is like saying "why bother sponsoring a local child to go to a swimming competition when people are starving?" We can simultaneously be philanthropic in different ways to different groups. Moreover, focusing only on the "most dire" problems (and ignoring everything else) is not a good way to help the world as a whole develop into a safer, more equitable place. So, I view OLPC as a part of the overall puzzle: a positive step that can be implemented in some countries, and which will help stimulate those countries to become more prosperous and independent.
The North American model sadly doesn't come with the hand-crank. It's not clear if those will be available for purchase later on, or if I can use (or mod) my cell-phone hand-crank to work with the XO laptop. Excited to try out the XO though, and I'm very happy to support this project.
With the worth of the US dollar dropping so rapidly, most Europeans could afford to buy a couple of these with the loose change in their pockets. $399 is about 3.99 Euro these days. Maybe a slight exaggeration there, but we're not so far off the 100 Euro laptop :-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Yes it is.
I sponsor a teacher in a school in South Eastern Madagascar. By this, I mean that I pay for her board & lodgings. The government pays her salay (approx $500/year) I have done this for the past 4 years.
The village where she teaches is 4 hours by 4WD vehicle to the nearest tarmaced road. They have plenty of food, clean fresh water etc. What they lack is the rest of the things that connect them with the outside world. There is 1 TV in the village. I supplied it alone with a solar panel, some car batteries and an inverter. They have a pirated Satellite encoder and can now stay in touch with the outside world. The thirst for knowledge of the children is fantastic. If I were in the US I would buy several of these units for the village.
The lack of infrastructure(ie no Electricity) is irrelevant for the OLPC. That said, next year I'm hoping to get a small water turbine installed and connected up to a generator. They will have electric light for the first time. Then we can start to make changes to the houses so that the epidemic of lung diseases can be tackled. This is due to the houses not having chimneys and all cooking is done over an open charcoal fire.
I visited the village again in October. I took supplied of pencils and paper (bought in-country) I also took pictures of the children and printed them out in front of them. They took them home to very proud parents.
The OLPC concept will help bridge the gap between the 1st world and the bottom parts of the 3rd world.
You seem to be under the faulty impression that the OLPC laptop is meant to teach children how to use computers. It actually tries to teach them far more basic (and important) skills than that; reading, writing, math, etc. Things that will give these children a way to earn money and escape poverty in the future. That they'll also be able to learn about computers and the internet is just a bonus but irrelevant to whether the OLPC will be succesfull.
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Got one for my inner child! How can I resist a laptop from the folks who first thought up the DynaBook?
OK, when I get tired of it, it will probably go to my nephew (whose second birthday happens to be today).
Considering I've been hearing about the OLPC constantly for years so it's permanently etched in my brain, and this post is the first I've heard of the Asus one, I don't think the upstaging has gone very well.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
And the way to change the landscape is to get people used to using something different in a place where there isn't a de facto standard. Or $diety forbid teach them to think and learn so that they can make the choice themselves as to what OS to use when their country becomes less technology challenged.
Or is education of the end-user not the ultimate goal here?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I would order one in an instant!
Because you want to do good (whether OLPC is doing good or not is your call), and because you want a piece of tech history.
The XO basically revolutionize the low-end portable computer market. They where the first to talk about ultra low cost, ultra-portable, low-power computing, and as such kick-start the movement which gave us recently the Asus Eee and the Intel ClassMate. Without them, the market would have slowly converge toward cheaper and cheaper hardware, but I think we would still be a couple years away before the laptop industry change its mindset from "let's pack more power for the same amount of money" toward "cheap enough to be ubiquitous". I doubt OLPC and the XO would get credit for that, unfortunately.
The XO is also a marvel of engineering. The Sugar interface is the first completely kid-centric interface to come out of Open-Source, and leading the pack on that front. The hardware have been carefully thought-out, and it show. It may not be the best laptop for an adult (it is completely kid-centric), but this not just a bunch of discrete parts thrown together by an ODM. Finally, as if it was not enough, five words: built-in Wifi mesh network. If that does not scream "cool" to you, you need to hand over your geek card right away.
So go grab a rebranded Asus on Black Monday and enjoy your crap imitation of a real laptop. In the meantime, I will continue to use my five years old Thinkpad, which will probably outlive the pathetic knock-off you can buy in the price range you quote.
:wq
Actually it can be considered to be better than a eee PC which costs about the same (well $100 less). I would love to have a Solid state laptop (no fan!) and a high res monochrome screen (reading!), and low power (green!).
Bad luck I'm in Scandinavia, may be you can buy one and send it to me?
As a programmer, I look forward to seeing the software efforts that are built atop this platform. There's plenty of room for free educational software for kids and this looks like a good platform for it. Surely someone will port the platform stack to a standard Linux distro, and then any software you write for this, you can run on your PC you bought at Wal-Mart.
Cheers, Frank
Currency From: CAD
Currency To: USD
Exchange Rate: 1.03014 From our friends at the Canadian Revenue Agency:
"Generally, you cannot claim donations made to U.S. charities on your Canadian income tax."
I'll take that 3 cents on the dollar though!
(If you have US Income, you can use the donation to off-set that...)
Dawson
The underlying window manager is Matchbox.
There is a Developer Console activity which provides a shell, log viewer, X resource meter, and memory usage meter.
If you want a more adult interface than Sugar, you might be more interested in PepperPad. They are providing an OLPC compatible pre-release containing both a 1.5 JVM and a more adult-oriented environment.
"And ye shall know them by their works..."
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
I set the alarm clock for 5:40 (EST), and refreshed the order page a few times ... but discovered I had to update my PayPal info, so I missed my chance to have the order in at 6:00 am on the dot ;)
One thing I'd like this for is to take on my next (very infrequent) plane flight -- the cheapo laptops I have right now have both terrible battery life and more heft than airline trays like. (Oh, and don't open well in that tiny space the airlines call enough room for a passenger.) With the T-Mobile deal, it also means I can take it to the local Borders bookstore.
If I were more employed than indebted, I'd have gotten one for my niece, too; maybe next year they'll have another (next-gen) sale of XOs, if the project is still around.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If you want to help a kid somewhere then why don't you donate your $400 to Unicef so it can buy food and medicine for 1000 kids? Or donate it to Amnesty INternational so they can stop kids from being raped and tortured in Cambodia?
Seriously - buying laptops for kids should not be P1 in terms of global humanitarian aid folks.
There is a lot of flame bait and rather than reply directly to it, I will just reiterate some basic facts about the
laptop and the project.
A lot of super-reputable people at MIT and some of the best employees at a number of key players in the
semi-conductor/hardware/software industries have put together a laptop specially designed for children
in the developing world.
* It has super low power requirements, so that it can be powered by things like a hand crank
* You can read the screen in full sunlight. It's also ruggedized to survive rough handling, so the
build quality has to be high.
* It's small and lightweight so a child can lug it around.
* The wifi antenna is way more powerful than the average laptop, and even in places with no internet
connection at all, children will be able to network with each other via the mesh network. Moreover,
given the antenna range, it's possible that there could be a mesh network over large regions of a
country, which could replace conventional telephony, or provide telephony in places that don't have it.
* It has a suite of software and an interface that would appeal to children. Developers have spent
oodles of time coming up with packages that reside in the relatively small memory and hard disk space.
* It has great internationalization support in the software. This much is necessary if it's going
to be used in non-english speaking countries all over the world.
* It has a camera. This camera might be the first one, or one a few in the places where this laptop
will wind up.
* When production scales up, it is designed to cost roughly $100. The only thing preventing this
from happening now is cautious countries who are waiting to place large orders.
Based on these points, I would say that a lot engineering challenges have been met and this is a kind of
watershed event in the history of the distribution of computing technology.
Why is a laptop important for education?
While you can certainly waste time and goof off on the web, there is also a wealth of instructional
material, learning material, free encyclopedias, and help of all kinds to be had on message boards.
Children could learn, for example, methods of improving local sanitation, agricultural techniques,
and health information which could end up saving the developed world millions or billions
of dollars in humanitarian aid. They could also learn other languages which could open up entire worlds
to them.
Even if they didn't have the internet, they could learn how to program, how to compute, make art, photographs,
drawings, and a whole bunch of other stuff with it. Not to mention the fun factor. It's not an educational
panacea but it WILL change the world.
Yes, you can easily run the emulated Sugar environment on a variety of platforms. See this page for emulation instructions.
The core developers run Sugar directly on their Linux desktops. Those instructions are here.