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

Give it a day...

[Greenmoon]

They'll have it up to $1000.

Pesky decimal points....

Re:Give it a day...

[Enderandrew]

Did they calculate their costs with a Pentium II?

Re:Give it a day...

[Bender_]

Indeed, wasn't there a similar indian initiative that never really caught on? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simputer

Re:Give it a day...

[Yvan256]

Nah, it was calculated by Verizon.

Re:Give it a day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simputer was not a bad product at all. It lacked the right kind of support by the government and other institutions when the promoters of the product needed it. At a time when Indian IT was largely riding on software skills, outsourcing and bodyshopping some young professors of the Indian Institute of Science came up with the bold idea of making a low-cost handheld computing device. Things did not work out for no fault of theirs. India missed a great opportunity.

In before...

[gparent]

They must've added Windows to it?

Re:In before...

[dashesy]

It is all for poor and needy. 9$ Hardware. 10$ for poor oil industry (was 1$ for transportation before). 45$ for poor M$ stockholders. 36$ for poor politicians.

Sheesh...

[religious freak]

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

$10? $100? Both are shocking prices..

[Channard]

... I mean, how the hell am I supposed to sell people a $400 extended warranty on top of that?

With the way the US economy is going...

[langelgjm]

Just give it some time, the dollar will get there.

Re:With the way the US economy is going...

[Anonymous Coward]

hopefully the users of this laptop will have to call and talk to someone with a thick, indecipherable American accent to get tech support. Fair is fair.

I still think $10 would be possible.

[StreetStealth]

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).

Re:I still think $10 would be possible.

[nbert]

I'm neither a product engineer, but I highly doubt that there is any way to produce anything resembling a laptop below around $90. Just add up the cost for raw materials and then think about the per unit cost of manufacturing the final good. For example look at CPUs: Regarding energy consumption and engine costs it's not so much difference if you build a high end chip or something very low-level. I'm not saying that they feature the same per-unit cost, but they are pretty close. The big difference is that the high-end chip must pay for all the research put into it. Just in case Intel decided to release 386 again they wouldn't be much cheaper than $30. If that doesn't convince you look at the casing: We are not talking about $1 per unit. It's more likely that you will pay around 3 just for the most basic design.

And if you are still in doubt: Take a look at the RAM prices. This industry currently has to cope with negative margins in many areas, which means that you are paying less than it costs them to produce it. Still I couldn't find anyone selling 256 megs for less than $5.

The computer I bought in 1993 might feature a market price below $10, but that doesn't mean that the production costs were anywhere near that line.

Re:I still think $10 would be possible.

[kesuki]

"I'm neither a product engineer, but I highly doubt that there is any way to produce anything resembling a laptop below around $90."

yeah there is. first off, you're ignoring one important thing. a computer really only needs an 8-bit processor. 8-bit processors use very low amounts of ram, because of their word length. 64k is often the total ram of a powerful 8-bit microprocessor.

zilog processors can sell for as little as $1. you said there is no way no how a processor can cost $1, yet basic 8-bit zilog processors cost as little as $1 and for that you get a healthy 20 mhz, over 5 times faster than the colecovision adam home computer (z-80 at 3.8 mhz).

they even sell a 50-mhz 8 bit processor, but 20 mhz is plenty fast.

i don't know about intel or motorolla, but zilog still sells a wide line of 8-bit 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors, including a low power Zilog that can run on as little as 2 volts. if that's not enough for you they sell an 8-bit chip with tcp/ip that can generate http web pages, eg: for web control interfaces for a microcomputer..

"eZ80® is revolutionizing the high-performance microprocessor market for today's 8-bit embedded applications. The eZ80® can operate at speeds up to 50MHz and address 16MB without a Memory Management Unit. This family supports demanding TCP/IP networking applications, featuring an Embedded Internet protocol stack that enables the transmission of HTML form data and the dynamic generation of web pages, and supports additional higher-level networking functions such as email and SNMP."

i don't know what an ez80 chip costs, but your 'everything must cost $30' assumption assumes a lot of things. how would an 'electronic controlled' thermostat cost $30 if the microprocessor couldn't be reduced below $30? the simple fact is, yeah it can be, and you don't need to make a zilog on 45 nanometer dies to get great price/performance ratios..

also, the Z-80 product line is virtually unchanged since the 1970's

that makes implementing z-80 products extremely cheap, since you don't have to design new code if you already have access to old code that was designed for z-80s.

and before you say 'but you could never get windows on an 8-bit cpu' remember that the NES was a z-80 derived product. you can have a simple, streamlined 8-bit OS and gui, that works just fine without all the HZ, and does just what you need... you could get a $10 laptop, if you really were willing to restrict it to all 8-bit software and the inherent limitations.

100$ Laptop

[geogob]

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.

Re:100$ Laptop

[maxume]

Here cars are way better than there cars. In a here car, you get in and then somebody says "We're here". In a there car, you get in and then somebody says "Are we there?".

Re:Common sense

[reverseengineer]

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.

$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:at what cost though?

[quantumplacet]

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.

Re:Dollar vs.

[Yvan256]

What do you mean? An african or an european rupee?

Specs leaked - it's the P-P-Powerbook

[SuperKendall]

I have it on good authority that India is in contact with the P-P-Powerbook designers right now for large-scale assembly.