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OLPC Halves Power Consumption For XO 1.75
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has reduced the price of the next version of its notebook to US$165 and power consumption has been slashed by half compared to the previous version. The XO-1.75, with its 8.9-inch touchscreen, will start shipping in the second quarter of this year."
surprised this wasn't in the summary but "The XO-1.75 is the first OLPC laptop to use chips based on processor technology from Arm Holdings, which has been a huge factor in reducing power on the laptop, " Good stuff, and it seems as if the mythical $100 price is within shooting distance
On the one hand, this article makes a clear case that there will be children in Chad mindlessly turning a crank for one hour and 47 minutes in order to do their homework for the night.
Yet on the other hand, these kids have orders of magnitude more computing horsepower than I did as a Reagan-era high school kid in an upper middle class community. Hard to know who should envy who.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
But didn't we learn from the promise and price fiasco with the 1.0 and beta of this hardware?
Side-effect learning: they were the first to step into what is now called netbook and probably the very existence of the netbooks and ebook readers has roots in their first attempt (even if they failed on price, they showed there is a market for low-end laptops). Keeping into acount they are not a for-profit, it's still remarkable they managed to pull such a trick.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I never thought I'd be a beneficiary from the OLPC project. I'd never be able to use an OLPC for anything I do. But I love how the project has put a bent in the technical landscape of portable devices industry. It was a failure as an education project perhaps, but it succeeded in more than one way as a laptop research project.
When OLPC came out in 2007, the laptops were on a lap-melting, back-breaking rush towards bigger & faster. Nearly everything came in with a Core2 or a Core2 Duo, with lots of RAM (yeah, guess what you can't save power on, RAM needs a strobe whether it has data or not). The fact that OLPC came out in 2007, sort of forced the geeks to look at weight as a valid concern for a consumer device. Not to mention questions about why a 1995 top-end laptop ran for 4 hours on batteries, when a 2005 one won't do the same at the same weight.
Less than a year after OLPC came the rush of netbooks. Finally machines that people can afford to buy (like here in India) and carry around without being tied to a wall plug. Scroll paste a few years, it is not only consumers, using them. I see Rasmus post PHP benchmarks off his netbook, I see entire teams (like Inkscape) suddenly sit up and re-work their UI workflows/dialog-space for it. I see the Notion Ink use OLPC Pixel Qi tech in the new tablet.
Socially speaking, the project has been a great failure. But technologically, it has left a huge impact on portable devices everywhere. As for the former, the project probably forgot that "Charity begins at Home". Refusing to sell full-price to americans wanting them shows a complete lack of understanding of how economies of scale & price segmentation would've worked out. I'm not going to mourn the failure of Negroponte, but I'll just give the technical folks at OLPC a big thumbs-up.
I'll happily pay 200$ for an arm netbook'ish if they'll sell me one in India. Hell, I'll even fix all the things that don't work for me - for FREE. Not all of us are poor & in need of a hand-out. Heck, I'm at the verge of putting in a pre-order for a Notion Ink Adam, for double the price, if the hype pans out.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
> Had they done that then they wouldn't have had the issues with Intel
> back stabbing them nor Microsoft wasting their time.
Did you read the press release? It's thank you sir, may I have another! They cite Microsoft's (likely vaporware or App store locked down) porting of Windows to ARM as being the reason the ARM version is now a viable notion. They still can't imagine a world without teaching the kids to be good Microsoft Office Users.
> They should have started with ARM to begin with.
No that would have been pointless at the time. If it isn't apparent by now their whole plan was to wave the penguin flag until Microsoft came through with a cheap enough deal you haven't been paying attention. ARM would have made that plan impossible. Besides, they had AMD in as a partner at the beginning... until they used them as a lever to force Intel to give em a sweet deal. Problem was once Intel got AMD out they stopped giving em free stuff because by then it was clear there was zero chance Negroponte was actually going to be able to deliver on any of his promises.
Democrat delenda est
Flash is a curse on the web...
But it does work on some ARM stuff. Just because Apple doesn't have it doesn't mean others don't. I have it on my N900, for instance.
Most $600 cellphones [...]
Most $600 laptops have more functionality and more power than this thing. That matters exactly fuck-all to people who cannot even afford a $165 laptop on their own. Besides, how would you like doing your homework or reading long texts and watching films on a cell phone? Did you even look up what the OLPC project is about? The kids in the third world do not need an app store, they need a platform that enables them to get used to a machine that magically emits light, shows pretty pictures that can move and make noise, and that allows them to talk to someone outside their range of sight. Ideally one that survives in the desert and uses little power. Which is precisely what the XO was designed from the ground up to be.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.