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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."
They'll have it up to $1000.
Pesky decimal points....
They must've added Windows to it?
I'm getting tired of seeing people screw up on OLPC, I think I must've seen this type of stuff at least .01 times
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
If you're willing to use non-buggy CPU that sometimes moves the decimal.
You don't need to read the label on a $0.35 chocolate bar to figure out it's made of 3% chocolate, 60% fat, 20% lecithin, and 27% wrapping.
... I mean, how the hell am I supposed to sell people a $400 extended warranty on top of that?
Just give it some time, the dollar will get there.
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Even if this story began as a typo, I don't think a $10 laptop is a pie in the sky.
The key here is to rethink our expectations for a laptop versus what the developing world actually needs. The OLPC, for example, is a beautiful machine, but its capabilities are honestly far beyond a baseline which would still make a huge impact on schoolkids living in poverty.
Imagine something like the following:
- Reflective, passive-matrix black and white screen
- Low-end (ARM9-based?) system on a chip
- 256 meg flash-based hard drive
- Custom, miniscule Linux distro consisting mostly of a web browser
- Big, old-style NiCd batteries
- 1995-style trackball
- Wired network adapter; USB host with optional wi-fi addon
With some creative engineering, I could imagine this sort of system getting down to the $tens, and with the kind of mass production you'd need to get this to many millions of kids, I think an ultimate $10 pricetag is completely doable.
Of course, I'm not actually a product engineer, so perhaps a real one could tighten up my specs (or dash my unrealistic idealism on the rocks).
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If we distributed a whole bunch of OpenMoko phones and a whole bunch (but not necessarily quite as many) OpenMoko development machines, this would accomplish what OLPC was trying to do.
Mobile Phones and SMS TXT services are already transforming large portions of Africa. Mobile phone infrastructure is a lot faster to set up and a lot less vulnerable to looting than wired infrastructure. It's a lot more scalable than the OLPC mesh networking -- after all the owners are economically motivated to expand it. SMS and mobile is already giving Africans access to networking and financial services that they didn't have before. (Yes, there's SMS banking in Africa now.) Completely open smartphones with completely indigenous developers would fuel innovation and economic growth in a way which is immediately practical, useful, and completely tailored to local needs.
Oh I see where this is going...
Optional accessories:
- LCD screen : 150$
- CPU : 100$
- 512 Mb RAM : 50$
- Battery : 100$
- AC Power adapter : 80$
etc.
There are things money can't buy, but for laptops accessories, there's mastercard.
But yeah... I guess the laptop could be 100$ itself.
Back to the good ol' times where GM sold there cars with "wheels" and "Steering wheel" as an option.
yeah but the value of the dollar's fallen a LOT since when it was announced as 100.
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...
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Well, I'd almost guarantee that it will have better hardware than my first computer (Apple IIe) and that didn't leave me with less of a willingness to push forward on the internet. Ultimately, I'm just kind of being a dick here, but you do have to remember that what we might consider crappy and slow, they might still consider amazing. Yeah, it sucks when it takes 2 minutes to open a web browser, but if you've never seen the web before it's still great, and if it's your only access to the web it's still worth it.
What do you mean? An african or an european rupee?
I'm already talking about the $1 laptop. Respect my incredible vision.
I have it on good authority that India is in contact with the P-P-Powerbook designers right now for large-scale assembly.
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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...)
Possibly a better car analogy would be giving an Indian family a Model T. Even though it's horrendously out of date, it's probably better than walking in a few situations.
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Corporations almost never follow sound economic policies. Falls under "not my problem".
It's been a long time.
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.
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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.