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India Will Show Its $10 Laptop Prototype
Tech Ticker writes "The Indian Government last year announced the development of a cheap $10 laptop, but was later rectified as $100 laptop. Now the government has announced that HRD minister Arjun Singh will unveil the prototype of a Rs. 500 ($10) computer. The computer is developed by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. No specifications were revealed but DNA, a daily newspaper, has mentioned that it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power."
... a $1000 beowulf cluster of those!
Sorry, had to be done...
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
I don't see why Negroponte's OLPC project didn't succeed before. I can buy a netbook on Newegg for 250$... yet a laptop with a quarter of the power and less functionality can't be built for less than 200$ for the OLPC.
Best of luck to India.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Great scott! The only thing capable of generating 2 watts is a battery.
No specifications were revealed but DNA, a daily newspaper, has mentioned that it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power.
A little critical thinking here: How, exactly, would anyone build that for $10? How much is the cheapest of cheap WiFi adapters at retail? $30? $20? Okay, now how thin are those margins?
I just don't see how they can pull all that off for $10.
My blog
But they hope for a lower price with mass production.
"At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down," R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.
Meanwhile, this laptop is still priced at $12.25.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
crore = 10 million
lakh = 100,000
As for the article's statement that "In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges," I think this is probably a misprint.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The laptops are actually going to be old cell phones with a pretty laptop-y cases around them...
Using cheap local labor in order to strengthen the local education is a very good move, both industrially and PR-wise. If they manage to mass-produce it, they will probably be able to sell the same machines for 20$ or 30$ abroad. It could give them a foot in a field that is China's stronghold. And I, for one, would prefer to see India (World's first democracy) to be labeled the World Factory than the People's Republic of China.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
It is true, it costs only 10 bugs, but you have to stay subscribed for something for next 47 years ...
Forgive me but how reliable could such a cheap product be? I am willing to suspend disbelief but this sounds like good old fashioned BS.
...and will feature an Intel QuadCore for a retail price of 10$. Of course.
slashwhat?
Am I the only one that finds a $20 price-tag utterly ridiculous?
Even if you use a TV for output, the SoC with wi-fi, cell-phone-style power supply, a keyboard and a GB of RAM cannot go for less than $20 and will not go for 2 watts.
This is seriously wrong and, when I see a government official making such lunatic claims, I expect the people being ripped off.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I thought China would do this before India because all I see around is stuff with the label "Made in China." I hear they (the Chinese), even made an iphone rip-off , but I have not seen it anywhere! So where is China's innovation?
That'll save you a bundle right there. If you write the engineering off as a total loss after you take the first corporation bankrupt and then you stiff the IP owners on royalties when you build them, you'll be on the way to getting it done. It will be flimsy, not include batteries (for 2W you can buy rechargeables), and have a very poor screen, and the $10 won't include packaging, marketing, distribution, or profit. The QA will be poor too, so there will be lots of failures, but at that price point most won't bother to send it back for repairs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Your average chinese MP3 player or cellphone with an added keyboard could be repurposed as a very cheap "laptop".
Who can they outsource?
but where da beef?
o'course it don't include no beef
indians dont eat beef bozo
Included will be a voucher for your trial version of Duke Nukem Forever.
Also, a calendar going up to 2050 specifying exactly the year of "Linux on the Desktop."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Not only will it be able to play doom/quake/unreal, but it will come with a pony too!
the quality will be laughable. Like I always say: cheap, quality, expandable: pick two.
Somebody must be getting a computer and a calculator mixed up.
Would make a certain amount of sense. Somebody wants to get lots of free advertising, so they make a fancy calculator and say it's a computer.
Who knows, maybe I'm even right.
(Okay, after RTFA it's the Gov't looking for free publicity and votes).
I suppose we'll see Feb 3rd.
Sounds a lot like a smart phone... Load Android and your done...
This laptop would not be possible if not for the work of Ninnle Labs, who created a slimmed down version of Ninnle Linux, with NinWM as the window manager. Should work fine.
I guess this differs slightly from the OLPC project, in that the laptop is only for distribution in India and that the MHRD (a.k.a Indian government ministry) is planning to play sugar daddy to this project "for perpetuity" to maintain the price at $10 (Which again no-one will pay, but will just be deducted off the grant to the participating government funded schools - I guess!!). Interestingly there is no mention of a display anywhere and the Bill of materials seems closer to $47 http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199203891
The sheer hubris of this announcement made me wonder: When did M. Night Shyamalan start making computers?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I'm picturing an abacus with 2 watts worth of LEDs, and a cup with a string.
For wireless data transmission: just yell, or glance at your neighbor's abacus.
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The only way to make any profit with a 10$ notebook is to preinstall shitloads of adware, trial software and other stuff that tries to nag more money out of the user. On a low performance machine, there won't be a lot of memory/clock cycles left to do anything useful.
When this thing hits the market, it'll probably deliver the most annoying user experience in history.
> A $10 laptop (Rs 500) prototype, with 2 GB RAM capacity....
Honestly 2GB ? If its DDR2, I might as well buy the "laptop" , chuck everything else and use the RAM. Its rather weird how it can be this inexpensive. I'm not sure if India has proper semi-conductor fabs, to make components this cheap - and what about licensing and stuff ?
,,, is for you to find uses for them.
That would have been part of the educational experience...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A $10 notebook is yet more proof that free markets, competition and Globalization will ensure the future strength prosperity of Western Civilization!
But can we get that price lower? I think we *can*!
1.) First, we have to trim the lowest 10% of performers from every organization. (Pay bonuses to executives for doing this effectively.) Tip: trim Human Resources last -- we need them to do the hatchet work while senior management strokes the shareholders and analysts.
2.) Repeat 1.) a few times and what will remain is a lean and absolutely *amazing* company of workers who do more error-free work with a facial muscle spasm than other schmucks do in 6 months with both hands and 20/20 vision!
3.) Next, we find cheaper workers. India's labour costs are a big part of that $10. Whom will we get to do the work? EASY... we train bonobos. We don't even have to feed them much -- those suckers are pretty lean.
4.) Sack all Testing and Quality Assurance people. With our lean, superproductive staff and well-trained bonobos, we won't need to test. And if there's a problem, we'll silence talk of it with legal threats and "promise" to fix the bug(s) in a future release. (Ha ha!)
5.) Squeeze as much free money as we can out of the government. If the government is Pro-Business, say we're creating new jobs in a cutting-edge market. If the government is Green, say we're saving the bonobos. If it's a coalition, say whatever you have to say no matter how self-contradictory or idiotic.
6.) Spend cash from 5.) on bribes to steal someone else's technology. R&D is for losers.
7.) Throw the product over the wall and pump up the advertising! If it fails, lock the workers out and give senior management a round of bonuses. But it won't fail, because using the above strategy, I think we have the $10 notebook down to $2.35.
Unless of course "$10" is a typo.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Yes, I'll have a chicken tikka, garlic naan, and a Rs. 500 laptop.
:wq
I can't imagine how they can do it for 10$ and still have 2GB ram. I mean a microcontroller here costs $2 ! Sure would make a nice way to control robots, if they're really going to make it for $10.
Right here.
By most accounts, and the most important of them is the GDP per capita
Translated into dollars or into Big Macs? There's a difference. Plenty of countries have deeply undervalued currencies, which makes the cost of living in those countries appear a lot cheaper than the cost of a comparable lifestyle in North America, Europe, Japan, or the Republic of Korea. Look up purchasing power parity and The Economist's Big Mac Index in the encyclopedia, and follow the references if you're interested.
The vast majority of their population still live like animals.
As opposed to some other country, where the majority of the population live like plants? I guess you're right: too many USA residents have become couch potatoes.
This would be wonderful stateside too. There are a lot of homeless people that hang around the public library here looking at porn all day. Imagine if after one day of begging, they could be looking at porn anywhere! Why, they could even look at it at their favorite hangout outside of XXX Liquor!
Seriously, I went to the library one time to get a copy of "Linux for Dummies", and I felt very out of place....
that's *capacity* not the measly arsed 256MiB it probably comes with...
Over 300 million people in India live on less than a dollar a day.
All that tells me is the rupee is likely undervalued vs. the USD. What is the relative purchasing power of Rs 49 spent in India vs. $1 spent in the United States? (You can't use the Big Mac index directly because consumption of beef is unpopular in India.)
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
The theory behind spending in this way is sound if you accept that the current situation is of a very specific type. Namely, that the economic slump and credit crunch are both persisting, at the core, because of depressed expectations about future economic output. The idea is that perhaps this downturn is more a feedback effect than a legitimate economic failure, such as would occur if there were severe infrastructure problems that fundamentally limited our real potential for wealth creation.
So the theory goes, our current economic state is under-performing relative to our actual potential output, and since this is just caused by a bad feedback (financial crisis causes credit to freeze, which causes problems for businesses that rely on credit for day-to-day operations, which leads to depressed expected future values, which feeds right back into the financial downturn, etc.), all that needs to happen is to bump the system back against this feedback. In other words, put gobs of money into the system, and it will (artificially, if you wish) increase expected revenues, which will increase valuations, which will make the numbers guys tell the business guys that things are looking better, and the credit markets will open up again, which will help to unclog the arteries of the rest of the economy.
So it's a perfectly valid theory, and amounts to sacrificing a bit of long term economic performance to (try to) achieve short term stability; considering that "short term" might mean half a decade or more, this is not altogether unreasonable. But it all depends crucially on the assumption that the economy is fundamentally sound and that this is just a departure from its normal operations; if it turns out that what we thought was our "normal" economic state was really the fluke (leverage + credit insanity = unsustainable growth), then it won't help things one bit.
Of course, if that's the case then we're probably screwed anyways, and a few trillion in debt here and there are the least of our problems.
Yah but will it support Crysis?
For a lot of the reasons already put forward, it seems unlikely that the Indians will be able to deliver a $10 laptop. They are also smart enough to know that people will go only as far as you push them. Give me two weeks to finish a project and guess what, I will use the time available. That's a big part of why Windows is so bloated. Computers are now HUGE, give a developer gigs of RAM and gigs of storage, well guess what, he'll use it! I remember the flight simulator I had on my C64. Can you imagine telling a kid today, "We need a spreadsheet app, and it needs to run on 1 meg of RAM". He'd choke, but in the end might actually do it. Same with India, if they said "we want a $50 laptop", they would wind up with a $75 laptop. $10 is ridiculous, but $25... mebbe not.
Those crafty Indians. They can't fool me. At $10 per laptop they're fucking selling abacuses.
You can now find Scientific calculators (non-graphing) for only $1 US at some dollar stores....
I'll buy that for $1.
all the licensing, sublicensing, sub-sublicensing costs for all the little parts, protocols, interfaces, patents and so on, are another HUGE chunk of the cost. And if it's not a direct copy, but a rewrite, and all hidden inside one dedicated chip, who is ever going to find out?
Well, the Linksys Linux is heavily modified (I assume) for their devices (using Broadcom CPUs), but somehow we still found out.
Anyway, do you really think they'll hide the codes in their firmware? I, for one, hope that they'll open source their stuff.
Why make more computers when there are plenty of old computers polluting our environment?
How true. Give me a touchscreen chinese MP4 Player add USB host functionality, LAN and flashable OS and i Have my netbook of choice.
Given the credit crunch crisis, laptops of Citigroup executives will be soon available on Ebay a dime a dozen, together with the rest of the company.
Apple could probably sell a version for $50 if they put their mind to it. Its peripherals and moving parts that add to cost and an iTouch has little of that. Keep the wireless, but drop the camera and motion sensors.
"As for citations do your own damn research" (Cheerio Boy (82178) )
You made the claim, You are being asked to back it up. Burden of proof is on you.
and the demand for Big Macs is not as large in countries like India as in the United States.
I was talking about purchasing power parity in general, using Big Mac sandwiches as an example of how to measure purchasing power separately from currency exchange rate. India is a special case, as it is the birthplace of a faith that prohibits consumption of the kind of meat in a Big Mac sandwich. Feel free to substitute another commodity to make an index that's more valid for countries with a large Hindu population.
$1 for a chalkboard and $9 to hire a group of people to follow you around and do whatever you write.
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Intel does not have factories in India
Plus, critical competitive technologies from US companies are legally forbidden to be exported to untrustworthy countries. India is on that list, by the way.
Isn't blatant IP ripoff more China's forte anyway?
Brazil starts development for the $1 laptop. Officials say it will feature no keyboard, just a big click wheel. For that the government will be forced to move a break on Apple Patents for the famous Click Wheel.
Another Features include:
*Internet Connection
It is possible that Indians can sell laptops for $10. Manufacturing costs can be skipped entirely by stealing the laptops from rich westerners.
Uh.
You are sort of missing something.
I don't know how to say this without feeling like I am painting you with the color "stupid"...
But...
Each laptop will have a 2 GB CAPACITY.
Not 2 GB of RAM out of the box, but will (possibly) allow you to BUY and INSERT more RAM after purchasing the machine.
In will likely actually ship with the bare minimum RAM to run a tweaked Linux distro, I am thinking maybe...
640 KB?
After all, who would ever need more than 640k of memory?
From the article:
"Indian government promoted low-cost laptop will cost US$100 and not $10 as earlier stated."
"A spokesman for Minister of State for Higher Education, D. Purandeswari, said on Wednesday that the price of the laptop would in fact be US$100 rather than $10.
"In a transcript of the speech delivered by Purandeswari at a conference in Delhi on Tuesday, which was provided by the government's press bureau to reporters, the Minister was quoted as saying that the government aims to provide $10 laptops to students.
"The transcript has been updated subsequently to reflect the new price of the laptop."
Read article at: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/255131/india_10_laptop_cost_us_100_after_all
Note: ad displays before article.
I am only posting this so that I can check out my new sig. Check it out!
Oh, and $10 laptops? What does it use for network access, carrier pigeons? (Cue rimshot...)
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Still, just the fact it has "2GB capacity" means it has at least one memory slot. I find that rather surprising, as at that price point, I would expect the ram to be soldered directly to the board and no upgrade capacity at all.
use /v. yuz or, for past tense form of 9, yust; n. yus/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [v. yooz or, for past tense form of 9, yoost; n. yoos] Show IPA Pronunciation
verb, used, using, noun
-verb (used with object)
to employ for some purpose; put into service; make use of: to use a knife.
And this has to do with $10 laptops how?
I am not devoid of humor.
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Haha, What a name. My guess is that the Sakshat will indeed be a Sak of Shat.
No specifications were revealed but DNA, a daily newspaper, has mentioned that it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power.
User interface devices and storage media sold separately.
Seriously, imagine what you could do with a small CCD and a mobile chassis for just one of these babies without those extra items, if not a hundred of them for $1000.
Now I just need heat-seeking pistol rounds and I can recreate the setting of the movie Runaway.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hyderabad/10-laptop_proves_to_be_a_damp_squib/articleshow/4072417.cms