India's "$10 Laptop" To Cost $100 After All

narramissic writes "In case you missed it, India's Minister of State for Higher Education yesterday announced the development of a $10 laptop that will target higher education applications. There were no specifications given for the laptop and the rock-bottom price raised questions about government subsidies. Today, the figure was corrected: It's not a $10 laptop; it's a $100 laptop. Still no specs though."

Comments

at what cost though?

[Lilo-x]

low cost of entry is all well and good, but is the experience going to be like? a poor entry experience will leave users with a bad taste and probably less of a willingness to push forward on the internet?

its nice to have price targets but we also need to set a standard of acceptable performance, ergonomically we could end up with a lot of people with serious ailments because not enough thought has been put into design.

Ultimately the industry needs to standardize and agree specifcations, we arn't playing with techs that can chuck an EEE around and hit their quad core when they need to do serious work, we are dealing with people who will have these as their prime working environment and its unacceptable to push out 3rd rate products to 3rd world countries and give them problems the developed world has solved pretty much in the past decade.

Re:at what cost though?

[MightyYar]

On the other hand, back in the days the content was also less demanding.

But if there were a few million users out there with no ability to access "web 2.0" content, I presume that market niche would be filled - either by "light" versions of the heavy sites or by new sites. I'd wager that many could just use their mobile sites.

Re:at what cost though?

[kabocox]

Very true. On the other hand, back in the days the content was also less demanding. It is like participating in a 2008 car race with a Ford T. In its days it was great, but conditions have changed. (moderate car analogy...)

Makes me want to have a model T in every race just for base line comparison purposes. It would be really sad though if that model T won over modern cars though.

Re:I still think $10 would be possible.

[lee1026]

doubtful. Typically, stuff don't much cheaper when you get much below the mainstream stuff.

Re:Ah, thats the ticket

[justdrew]

yeah but the value of the dollar's fallen a LOT since when it was announced as 100.

$100 is less than OLPC

[kesuki]

and if they stick with the same technical specifications long enough It will get down to $10.

I remember before intel was the king of CPUs that there was the Z-80, and by the mid-90's Z-80 embedded systems (like the franklin bookman electronic dictionaries) were selling for around $40, with a hangman cartridge on flash memory.. the big cost, back then was the flash memory, and sadly Franklin moved away from the command line/text interfaces to go with more costly fancier displays, etc. only to go to more simple displays again, and 'text to speech' processors...

here's the thing though, by the mid 90's the Z-80 microprocessor was so energy efficient that you could literally run it off 2 cr2022 lithium batteries, and while i didn't use the dictionary every day, it took 13 years for my batteries to fail, to be honest though i used it more for hangman than for a dictionary.

if i used it daily, it would still last a long time, though, especially since it saves where you are in the dictionary so you can turn it off, then when you turn it on again it's in the same place. very easy to use, and nice.

the reason why i know it's a Z-80 is because i took the dictionary apart to look at it once. they do have cheaper non speaking dictionaries today, as well. http://www.franklin.com/estore/dictionary/TG-450/ like that one (12 language translation! for $40) for whatever reason the language translating models cost the same as the basic english models, and they have a wide array of 'high end' speaking dictionaries, including ones with mp3 playback, and ebook reading features...

Re:$100 is less than OLPC

[nbert]

Two things which might prevent the development you described:

First of all $40 in the '90's are not $40 as of today.

Secondly it's not like the manufacturing cost gets cheaper just because time passes. If you start building them the way they used to be you have to take way higher energy and material costs into account (even in China it's not like electricity is so much cheaper that you will make a bargain). You could use newer technology and put them on smaller dies, but that would cost you as well. There is a reason why we don't build very old designs anymore - the benefits of newer designs outreach the cost savings we have from sticking to what we used before...

Re:Common sense

[mobby_6kl]

> I'd definitely pay more than 35 cents for a candy bar whose ingredients totalled 110% of its contents, just to find out how that was possible.

Actually, just today while shopping I noticed a sausage with the following label (paraphrasing as I'm too lazy to go downstairs to check): "100 kg of this product contains 160 kg of pork, 20 kg of beef, spices, ...".

In addition to some sort of reverse synergy magick of the ingredients, they also for some reason decided to show that for a 100 kg, instead of 100g or standard portion size as it is usually done with foods. Not that it matters due to the wonders of the metric system, but who the fuck eats 100 kg of sausage? The record consumption of various meats seem to be around 1.5 - 3kg.

Re:Give it a day...

[kabocox]

Indeed, wasn't there a similar indian initiative that never really caught on?

http://www.amidasimputer.com/

It looks like it did catch on. Just that it looks like a PDA to us. I wish the folks that make the barbie laptop would just license that, stick a barbie case on it, and sell it in the toy department here. There would need to be a hotwheels model too, but then I could get one for each of the kids.