Former OLPC CTO Aims to Create $75 Laptop

theodp writes "Mary Lou Jepsen, who left her One Laptop Per Child CTO gig on Dec. 31st, has reemerged with her sights set on a $75 laptop that will be designed by her new company, Pixel Qi, which is described as a 'spin-out' from OLPC. In a Groklaw interview, Jepsen calls for 'a $50-75 laptop in the next 2-3 years' and says it's time to go Crazy-Eddie on touchscreen prices as well." This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of "the entire third world learning Linux as children." Update: 01/10 21:22 GMT by T : ChelleChelle adds a link to an excellent interview with Jepsen in the ACM Queue, in which she discusses OLPC and some of the technologies it contains.

Comments

If we're going to go that cheap...

[suprcvic]

Why not just send all the kids TI-89's and teach them how to program those. I can't imagine anybody creating a PC of any worth for less than the cost of a graphing calculator.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Hatta]

That just shows you how overpriced graphing calculators are. Don't you think the prices should have dropped a bit more in the past 10 years? I guess when every HS student across the country has to buy one for their college prep classes there's not much incentive to compete on price.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Quadraginta]

Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.

E. F. Schumacher wrote an interesting and provocative book (Small is Beautiful) several decades ago about the routinely inappropriate "help" the First World often sends the Third. To grossly oversummarize, it's like we see someone painfully hauling a load of firewood down a dirt road in a poor country and decide to "help" by giving him a hybrid-electric pick-up truck. Of course, he has no good supply of gas, no way to maintain such a complex machine, no good roads to drive it on...and a mule would be a lot more appropriate and helpful.

It's hard not to wonder whether a focus on supplying cheap laptop computers is fully appropriate for kids whose principal problems probably lie more in the areas of crappy public hygiene, rampant preventable infectious childhood disease, AIDS and its consequences (e.g. becoming an orphan), civil unrest and insecurity, not to mention oppression in many places, and their parents not being able to get decent jobs close to home.

Maybe a Linux laptop at the right price point is a silver bullet for some of this nasty stuff, somehow, although I don't quite see it. I guess we'll find out.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[zippthorne]

There's nothing a graphing calculator can do on a test question that you couldn't do faster with a regular scientific calculator and some clever thinking. They're not only overpriced, they're a crutch that directly hinders college prep classes.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Carnildo]

Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.

$75 per child might get you a school library of a couple thousand books, but wouldn't you rather give them all of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

Fact is giving cheap computers to "poor" nations does not make them any happier, healthier, richer, or more educated. It just means that they have cheap computers. It may change the social dynamics around a bit, like reading a book at home on a computer instead of at the local school or library. It may even mean that somebody may get to work for IBM as a programmer through one of their off-shoring initiatives.

At any rate, since computers started to become superfluous in the West I have NOT noticed that people became more educated, happy, employed, etc (I'm sure those ppl still making big $$$ in the IT field would disagree). Yep, a shift in jobs for some people, and easier to do some second-hand research; but overall (unless you are a Gamer) I wouldn't say it has had a dramatic effect (for the better) on people's lives.

Don't get me wrong, I am certainly in favour of cheap computers, especially for poor people, but people should realize WHY they want this, and the reality of their ideals.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Kadin2048]

I was thinking along similar lines. But an 89 still costs over $100. How do they plan to make a computer for less than a calculator costs? Perhaps by not trying to charge $100 for something that was barely state-of-the-art ten years ago, and depending on their monopoly position in the market to ensure that people pony up?

The TI calculators are a prime example of how a market can stagnate when there's no competition. Pretty much since HP abandoned the educational market (which struck me as a bad idea, given how the professional market is getting eaten up by computer software packages) TI has rested on its laurels. Sure, every once in a while they toss out an incremental upgrade -- a little more RAM or Flash here, a little better screen there -- but by and large they're not doing a damn thing with their lineup, and they haven't decreased the prices much at all.

The TI-89 isn't bad -- it's probably the best handheld calculator out there, depending on how you feel about the HP-49 series -- but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if TI actually had some motivation to actually turn out a new model and cut prices every year or so, like the rest of the computer-hardware industry.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[wpiman]

The $100 OLPC initiative was start when $100 was worth substantially more. It they have gone with a 100 Euro laptops, they could really trick the thing out.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

The TI-89 is not $150 worth of hardware, it's a $20 calculator bundled with a $130 mathematics software package. Linux has no licensing cost, so the price comparison is meaningless.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[pinkocommie]

like reading a book at home on a computer instead of at the local school or library
Heh I grew up in Pakistan, not exactly the most impoverished of nations and the largest city has one large scale public library (there are local ones in high-end areas that cater to local neighborhood residents).
In order to read say a 3 investigators novel in middle/elemntary school I had to fork over 10 cents / day to a local private library. The household income at this point was in the range of 200 dollars (6k rupees) a month on which a family of 7 lived. And we were considered middle class. In comparison buying a new (pirated) book was around a dollar with a 'genuine' copy being around 6 dollars.
As you may guess even renting books from the local library was not exactly affordable in great quantities.
Far more relevant though, is back in the day my school had computer programming classes (BASIC) which I was virtually flunking, the whole thing seemed completely alien to me. A generous uncle bought us our first computer and my grades went from 50/100 to 99/100 and stayed in that range. I'm now earning well above the middle class in the US as a software engineer. For every person like me that actually got access to a computer and was able to leverage that there are probably hundreds if not thousands that were smarter then me and didn't. Imagine the potential lost, regardless of which field of study you think of.
imnsho this is a brilliant idea provided the likes of small minded governments and Intel don't completely screw it over.

...and

[thatskinnyguy]

...and it will end-up being $175 instead. We all saw how the $100 laptop dry run went.

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

It's truly an amazing world we live in, where we complain about a portable 2,000 cm^3 device that contains hundreds of millions of precisely-arranged components, can perform millions of calculations per second, and store billions of bits of data... because it costs $188 instead of $100.

Such a device would have been pure fantasy even 10 years ago, at any cost, and yet now we scoff that they couldn't get the cost down low enough.

I'm not attacking your point (which is that promised prices may not be delivered)... rather just marveling at how advanced our tech has become.

Re:...and

[imsabbel]

88% off are 88% off.
No matter if that base was 10c or $10 billion.

How to trust somebody doing calculations if he is nearly off by a factor of two?

Does school OS have anything to do with home OS?

[quanticle]

When I was young, all the computers at school ran MacOS. My entire introduction to computing was done on Apple IIs and Macintoshes. However, when it came time to buy a computer for home, our family bought a Windows machine because it had better specs. Starting these kids out on Linux doesn't necessarily mean that they'll stay with Linux.

Giver Her a Little More Credit

[eldavojohn]

Love the smell of Vapor in the morning. Ok, well, I guess to be fair, we should give her a little more credit than that. Mary Lou Jepson does have a PhD in opitcs and a BS in EE. She seems to be quite competent and is credited with some key design and inventions for the OLPC and also working politics with companies to design these displays specifically for the laptop, defined by the laptop. Not an easy thing to do.

So I'm guessing she was upset from the cost and believes that she can cut cost by doing again what she did for the OLPC, designing a better, cheaper display. This time, she can probably negotiate better deals as I'm sure the # of XOs in development causes display manufacturers to salivate.

So, before you accuse this of being vaporware, I would caution you that she has held up her end once for the OLPC ... and she seems to be highly motivated. She's got street cred.

Now, what makes me salivate is the site's promise to keep everything open. The software's a given at this point but open hardware would be revolutionary and present yet another learning possibility for users.

Re:Fyunch-click - You fixed *what*?

[mykepredko]

When I saw the quote, I thought about the scene in the book where the Moti Engineer took apart and put together Lady Sally's palmtop computer which was thought to be impossible because everything was one single unit.

To hit $75 for a laptop, the same technology will be required.

myke

Stop thinking of it that way.

[xzvf]

As an educational tool, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Look at the laptop type devices being put out by Leapfrog, V-tech and Fisher Price. All in the $50 range. Adding a larger screen and internet access, might be possible for $75. It depends on what you want it to do and the profit margin expected. My Atari 2600 put some darn good games in 4K. The XO laptop is close to duplicating a full featured laptop for only $200. It is a resounding success. If for profit companies can build on that with a number of educational appliances that cost $75 and down, even better. If OLPC and the XO have a problem it isn't the hardware, it's software designed to allow kids to learn themselves and an inability to market that idea. Like schools in the US, the administration wants control, and they often resent kids learning on their own.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[Hatta]

Using more than one OS ensures that they'll learn general skills instead of just learning how to use app ABC on OS XYZ.

Re:A major roadblock

[poot_rootbeer]

I don't see the LCD screens getting down to a price making this possible.

Hmm, I dunno, maybe Ms. Jepsen will create some innovative new display filter technology that allows 200dpi color-capable LCD screens with backlighting to be built for roughtly the same cost as a 75dpi monochrome LCD screen. Wouldn't that be something...

World Class Machine

[hhawk]

This is huge news. I've always said we need a computer that many people in the world can afford. With 5-6 Billion People a 600 to 700 machine is so far beyond their reach. I'd really like to see a $25 machine but $75 great.

My theory, un-tested is that most family's can't afford to budget more than 1 weeks income every 3-4 years for a computer. Of course the wealthy can do whatever they wish. Personally I spend $800 on a monitor every 5-7 years and $400 to $500 on a new CPU/Box every 14 months.

With a price at $75 I would expect that means there is at leaset 1 BILLION people whose family can now afford such a device, and may be more than that. I'd like a machine that 4 Billion people could afford every 3-5 years. They we will have a real shot a planet wide culture. Today we have A few 100 million to a Billion people spending most of the $$, most of the energy, etc.

Putting a cheap computer in their home will not change economics but it can help teach them to read, and give them a path to education, which might take a few generations but will help all over time.

Personally low powered desktops would be better than laptops esp. a model that could use the TV screen to lower costs, for those homes that have TVs.

What they don't seem to realise is...

[asuffield]

Crazy Eddie is supposed to fail.

Re:How about a DS?

[gad_zuki!]

It doesnt have a keyboard and the screen is way, way too small to be used for anything serious like schoolwork. Just because theyre third-world doesnt mean they deserve junk like this. Their ergonomics should be important to us. Its a real shame it isnt.

Re:How about a DS?

[Kuukai]

Well, this has many of the same problems the Classmate does, according to TFA. It isn't waterproof, it's not very durable despite your assertions (if you don't know someone with a broken one, you need to get out more), and the battery life/expense/environmental-effect isn't very good. Like the sibling posts mentioned, it also requires licenses to develop for, and it has no keyboard, making input tedious. In addition, there are some general factual errors with your post. Hanafuda isn't "for children," so I wouldn't say Nintendo has been in the toy business for a 100 years. Also I don't know of any software to "learn cooking" on the DS any better than you can "learn guitar" on the PS2... Cooking Mama gives you a "general idea," but you're not going to succeed without a real recipe. The kind you can look up on Google. With an XO.

Re: Families & Computers

[hhawk]

I think EIC is US thing? I'm not really sure. I'm fairly sure that the bulk of the world's poor, up to 5 Billion of them in places like China, India, Africa, etc. don't get EIC.

Re:So by the time we can buy one...

[Doug Merritt]

Reading your (few and ancient) journal entries, apparently you have wondered in the past why you have been called a Troll.

I don't get why Slashdot gives so much press to these people when they admit they can't maintain their own goals,

"Citation needed", except you're probably merely talking about the OLPC target price of $100 versus the recent actual price of $188. Well, duh, "target price" is a hope for the future. Initial price being higher is not "admitting they can't maintain their own goals". Sheesh.

the program is mired in political bullshit,

"Citation needed", very definitely. "Mired" is unsupportable, and "political bullshit" is created by their enemies (clearly including Intel at this point), but you phrase it as if OLPC themselves did something wrong. I call bullshit.

and the very idea of giving kids a laptop and acting as if it will cure all their ills is idealistic at absolute best.

"Citation needed" once again. You make me tired. Talk about hyperbole. No OLPC person has ever said that the OLPC goals will "cure all their ills". That's bigtime bullshit, and you should be ashamed for the misrepresentation, you really should.

OLPC is bust,

"Citation needed" yet again! They are shipping. They're an ongoing concern. There is no strong evidence that they have actually "failed" (either short term or long term) in any sense at all.

Netcraft confirms.

I searched Netcraft and saw nothing about OLPC, but maybe I just wasn't thorough enough. Still, this smacks of merely more of your trolling.

Before posting, I checked your slashdot journal and your website. Your research seems interesting, you seem superficially as if you might be an interesting person, but apparently once in a while you just get irrationally angry on some topic and, given what you yourself have said on the topics in question, do not understand that that's what you have done. Introspect more, then you will see why (once a year or so, since you post infrequently) people say you are a big time Troll.

You're being so much of a troll here that it makes me wonder what you did 5 years ago to get +1 Karma. Maybe you should wonder, too, and then try to repeat your positive side, rather than your negative side!