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One Laptop Per Child's $100 Laptop Was Going To Change the World -- Then it All Went Wrong (theverge.com)
Adi Robertson, reporting for The Verge: In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte's new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), dubbed "the green machine" or simply "the $100 laptop." And it was like nothing that Negroponte's audience -- at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech summit in Tunis, or around the globe -- had ever seen. After UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered a glowing introduction, Negroponte explained exactly why. The $100 laptop would have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank.
[...] But OLPC's overwhelming focus on high-tech hardware worried some skeptics, including participants in the Tunis summit. One attendee said she'd rather have "clean water and real schools" than laptops, and another saw OLPC as an American marketing ploy. "Under the guise of non-profitability, hundreds of millions of these laptops will be flogged off to our governments," he complained. In the tech world, people were skeptical of the laptop's design, too. Intel chairman Craig Barrett scathingly dubbed OLPC's toy-like prototype "the $100 gadget," and Bill Gates hated the screen in particular. "Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text," he told reporters.
[...] After announcing "the $100 Laptop," OLPC had one job to do: make a laptop that cost $100. As the team developed the XO-1, they slowly realized that this wasn't going to happen. According to Bender, OLPC pushed the laptop's cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. [...]
[...] But OLPC's overwhelming focus on high-tech hardware worried some skeptics, including participants in the Tunis summit. One attendee said she'd rather have "clean water and real schools" than laptops, and another saw OLPC as an American marketing ploy. "Under the guise of non-profitability, hundreds of millions of these laptops will be flogged off to our governments," he complained. In the tech world, people were skeptical of the laptop's design, too. Intel chairman Craig Barrett scathingly dubbed OLPC's toy-like prototype "the $100 gadget," and Bill Gates hated the screen in particular. "Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text," he told reporters.
[...] After announcing "the $100 Laptop," OLPC had one job to do: make a laptop that cost $100. As the team developed the XO-1, they slowly realized that this wasn't going to happen. According to Bender, OLPC pushed the laptop's cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. [...]
I mean why not just get an android tablet with keyboard case and call it a day. There are numerous sub $100 android tablets.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Nobody ever believed they'd be able to do this, and as TFS even points out, the intended recipients had far greater priorities to deal with.
This was always a solution in search of a problem, give $100/child to let them fix some of the basic problems, and this would have solved far more.
But this was about someone who wanted to sell la boatload of laptops to make money, and should have been seen as such long ago.
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
And they have changed the world.
Into one populated by way too many Meanderthalus obliviots
I bought an 8" Winbook tablet from MicroCenter on sale for $75, which means it probably cost the manufacturer $30 to build. Came with a full copy of Windows 8 that I upgraded to Windows 10, and a year of Office 365. It's not great, but it's infinitely more capable than the Commodore VIC-20 I started out on, and costs 1/5 as much in today's money.
I played around with it a bit and it's now hooked in to my stereo as a DLNA sink to bounce music to, with a big spectrum analyzer display via foobar2000.
My wife knows it's hard to get kids to sing when they are hungry, or don't know where they are sleeping tonight.
Equally difficult if kids are trying to use some newfangled laptop thing when they don't have clean water, or enough food.
Drill a well first. Engage one of the available nutrition providers. Then put a roof on the school. Then you can teach.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Computer system manufacturers had huge huge huge incentive to sink it. If it was a decent laptop, then it would be a huge disruption to their trillion-dollar market.
I can buy a pretty worthless laptop for about $200 right now, and it has a name like Asus on it. In order to be profitable to the store, and manufacturer, it really is a $100 laptop. They exist, but are sold for more.
I wonder how much of the OLPC informed todays $200 laptop.
Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
And for a few glorious years, one could buy subnotebook-sized PCs at entry-level prices. They had an Atom CPU that could run full desktop operating systems at roughly Pentium 4 speeds, not the fastest but still usable. Thus one could use them to work on hobby programming projects while riding transit to and from a day job. Then Apple released the iPad and MacBook Air, and laptop makers dropped the entry-level subnotebook segment in favor of tablets and Ultrabook laptops with a higher profit margin.
...no one else picked up where it left off and developed a successful low cost computer for educational purposes.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
From TFA:
Then, Negroponte and Annan rose for a photo-op with two OLPC laptops, and reporters urged them to demonstrate the machines’ distinctive cranks. Annan’s crank handle fell off almost immediately. As he quietly reattached it, Negroponte managed half a turn before hitting the flat surface of the table. He awkwardly raised the laptop a few inches, trying to make space for a full rotation. “Maybe afterwards” he trailed off, before sitting back down to field questions from the crowd.
Amazing that this problem didn't come up at all during the design phase.
Churning out billions of lines of code
That's what OLPC wanted to achieve.
It didn't happen.
All those people who claim that smart phones have changed the world? Yes, they have. But not the way the OLPC folks wanted. For one thing even a $500 smart phone is beyond the reach of the children that OLPC wanted to reach.
And can you imagine trying to write anything beyond a tweet on a smart phone keyboard? Even on an old Blackberry with a "real" keyboard?
The "one laptop per child" demand was met instead largely by smartphones.
While Negroponte was busily tilting at his particular windmill, Samsung and others built a more powerful, more legible, longer-service device that they could sell across the planet.
Score another one for the free market, really.
-Styopa
I agree with whoever anonymous person it was quoted in TFA: too many places on this planet, in 2018, have too many people who don't even have the basics to sustain their lives: clean water to drink, enough food to eat, and a safe place to live -- and actual schools for their children, not high-tech toys. How about we solve those problems for everyone on the planet first, instead of putting the cart before the horse?
I mean, it sounds like a neat sum in the ears of someone from the US, but for everyone else it's 1,198.25ZAR, 410.017TRY, 840.600SEK, 1,799.81MXN, 10,693.16JPY or 80.9115EUR.
And that even changes as time passes.
What would have been wrong with demanding "a laptop way cheaper than what laptops are being sold at today"? Because nobody gives a shit about whether it's 130, 180 or 200 bucks as long as it's worth it. It's not a "pretty" sum in 99% of the world's currencies anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The entirely Silicon Valley model is founded upon raising interest in shit which doesn't exist then delivering on it after you've raised hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
This is a fundamentally dumb model which favors marketing and sales people controlling wealth instead of scientists and engineers, so you end up with things like Theranos and OLPC, which after all the fundraising prove to be impossible at a technical level.
This in turn further consolidates wealth with the people most incapable of using it to drive Humanity forward: the marketing and sales people. Meanwhile the scientists and engineers are treated as tools to achieve the ambitions of the "big picture" morons.
The entire draw of OLPC was much like code.org/summer-of-code, in that if you give all the third world kids laptops then it follows you could radically undercut the labor costs of the nerds making the shit ideas happen. It's a good thing it failed, but the fact it gained so much interest is itself a sign of these horrible things.
There's no nice solution to this problem, but probably the one which would benefit Humanity the greatest amount while propelling us forward the furthest technologically would simply to be lynch the marketing and sales people, or maybe just trigger fault line and drop Silicon Valley into the ocean.
The third wold is not as illiterate as many Americans think they are. The OLPC project could only benefit those where at least the teachers knew how to use computer. But the schools where teachers knew how to use computer were already in the upper class in most third world countries. How to you give computer to village teachers? My sister is a teacher in a school which received computers from govt as part of pilot program. Two years later the teachers were fighting for playing solitaire on it during the period breaks. Not a single student had touched the computer. She herself had just learned how to switch on and switch off and create a doc in Notepad. No printing, no communication, nothing. This was in 2006-2008. Throwing a bunch of PC at students doesn't help them. They will benefit more if you give them money to buy books, notebooks, pencils, pen, chalk, dusters, musical instruments and so on. Almost all school students that I know, they waste more time on electronics gadgets then they use them. I wish the school had zero requirements for any electronics and these students would have done much better.
Funny how the side bar shows an ad for a $9 pc next to this article.
3D printing is actually pretty fucking big when it comes to science because it is used heavily in building test apparatus these days - which themselves would have driven up the costs of research projects by several orders of magnitude if they all had to be done via CNC still. Segways were fucking stupid and only idiots ever thought otherwise. Modern AI is definitely nothing like an AI - it's just a heuristic network at best, usually it's more rudimentary pattern recognition (e.g. we figured out how we do something, then made an obfuscated system to replicate that) that everyone seems to expect will develop sentience when you throw enough of it together - where the issue is we're still 50-100 years from having the world's most powerful supercomputer even having the hardware capability to match the brainpower of a mentally retarded person. I don't think people are seriously considering colonizing the universe via the asteroid belt, so much as they want backup plans on other planets and are using the bait of asteroid mining valuable materials in conjunction with pretending they have their head in the sand over the fact those things would be worthless and rapidly depreciating in value the moment you started a supply chain bringing them back to Earth - the overall intent on that one of having a backup in case Earth gets hit by an asteroid is a fundamentally good idea though.
To me the OLPC had three major points where it fell short:
Lack of regular consumer availability. They only sold the thing to the government, not to regular consumers. The Give1Get1 program was time limited and overpriced, since you were buying two. Thus the EeePC stole the show, since it was hardware that you could actually buy instead of just read about. The OLPC might have fared much better if they had released an adult version, with a bigger keyboard, more RAM and better color scheme.
Lack of self-hosting. While the idea of allowing people to write programs on the OLPC was there, that was never really all that practical. The software wasn't up to snuff and the documentation was lacking. Thus the OLPC ended up feeling much more like a consumer-only device, like a modern Android tablet, than a machine you could build stuff with yourself.
Underpowered hardware. 1GB Flash and 256MB RAM just wasn't enough, especially when it comes to Web browsing. It would fit the core OS barely, but it would drastically limit what you could do with the device. Double the storage and RAM would have increased the price, but it would also have lead to a much more useful device.
All that said, the OLPC itself might not have been the success they wanted it to be, but it was still the starting point of cheap computing devices. The idea of a $100 PC was utopic back than. Now I can buy $50 Android tablets and $30 Raspberry Pis.
I know it's a decade+ later, but we now have a $100 laptop. And it's quite usable. https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707
OLPC was a great idea though!
Professional Genius
Part of the give-one-get-one program, so I made a charitable contribution in the process (total cost $400). My daughter was a pre-teen at the time.
The fundamental problem with the OLPC is that it did not have any software that a child, or anyone not into systems hacking perhaps, could or would want to use. Sure there was Python on it, and everything was written in Python and if you wanted just to learn Python it might have a use case. But that was it.
It was more like a hardware demo prototype, than something was useful for anything.
My daughter never used it.
At the same time I bought an EEEPC with Linux on it. $375, roughly the same size. But it was about a million times more useful. My daughter loved it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
" because it is used heavily in building test apparatus these days - which themselves would have driven up the costs of research projects by several orders of magnitude"
Citation desperately needed.
" I don't think people are seriously considering colonizing the universe via the asteroid belt,"
Um, you sure about that? I used to keep tabs on Space Nutters, I had a list of posts and users that definitely were "touched" in the brain. Read this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project
BTW, breathe, dude. Sentences. Paragraphs. Jesus Christ.
An early example of the unsubstantiated idea that throwing technology, especially crappy technology, at kids/poor people/3rd world solves any problems at all. For kids in the 1st world too much technology access is probably developmentally destructive and seems to have little benefit toward actual academic achievement. This is somewhat related to the tired campaign promises of the past couple decades about retraining laid-off late-middle-age blue collar workers in high technology to somehow make them employable in that space, when the truth is very few of them have the aptitude or will ever be employed in tech no matter how much money government throws at diploma mills.
America was a first-world high-tech economy and society when not everybody had a personal individual computer or even a single computer in every home. In the 80s and much of the 90s it was an expensive luxury for many of us. Typically there would be a few machines in the computer lab or library at schools and universities. Why wasn't this a good enough way for the 3rd world to get started? Instead of one crappy joke of a laptop per child, how about a few truly decent shared machines in schools? Oh, and build them some schools first.
At this point with cheap smartphones its all moot anyway.
OLPC XO-1 had awesome screen, that could work either in color using the backlight, or in B&W in bright outside light. It already had very low-power backlight when compared to other screens at that time, and you could even get more power saving by disabling the backlight entirely when you were in a well-lit room or outside during the day. Great tech.
Lack of self-hosting. While the idea of allowing people to write programs on the OLPC was there, that was never really all that practical. The software wasn't up to snuff and the documentation was lacking. Thus the OLPC ended up feeling much more like a consumer-only device, like a modern Android tablet, than a machine you could build stuff with yourself.
Yet the inability to self-host* hasn't stopped the sales of iPad tablets and Chromebooks. Access to the GNU or LLVM development toolchain with the possibility for output through a GUI toolkit is the one thing I miss after the end of netbooks. Or are people desiring a subnotebook-sized device for writing programs expected to hoard used netbooks and learn to, say, replace individual lithium ion cells in their battery packs?
* By which I mean self-host without self-destructing like a developer mode Chromebook.
speaking of giving it a try....
Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Most patent attorneys have also heard that the quote is apocryphal.
https://patentlyo.com/patent/2...
good thing Edison and any others with a vision didn't give up or you'd have to use the Pony Express to mail in your negativity
I wish, as a kid, had such a shitposting machine. I could start my career 10 years earlier.
What does that have to do with anything?
There are far more predictions that failed entirely.
Just because someone predicts something that aligns with your preferences, doesn't mean it will happen.
We no longer have the Concorde, no one has gone to the Moon in almost half a century, and the only thing that has improved a lot over that time frame is: information processing.
End of story.
How hard can it be? Computers are magic right? We just sprinkle a little technology dust on it and bingo! $100 dollar laptop! What could possibly go wrong!
(later)
What! We should have investigated component costs, form factor prices, and production costs *before* we set the price?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They're called 11.6" laptops now. You may call that bigger but they're lightweight (about 1kg) and have 768 pixel height.
My complain is the TN display panel mostly. There's no technological progress on low end displays, you get what you pay for. I wish there were 1366x768 IPS displays, so that you can get a laptop that costs $10 more but has a better screen.
I doubt the veracity of this article. Someone with more design experience than I have: offer a better design. Start with a $35 Raspberry Pi, add inexpensive SD card, inexpensive VGA screen, inexpensive keyboard, and inexpensive mouse. I hardly believe that the total cost will exceed $100. It seems that a cranked power supply is the only missing component that needs to be designed. Is a 5 volt, 1 amp, power supply that difficult to design, driven by wind, sun, or powered by hand? In a school setting, it makes more sense to have a centralized power supply, at less cost than individual power supplies.
Edison invented hardly anything
Chromebooks are big in edumacations.
* Cheap (especially in volume, wholesale prices negotiated between school district and selected manufacturer)
* Choice of manufacturer, price, features, size, memory, storage, cpu, and MOST IMPORTANTLY: style, color
* Fairly durable
* Can be managed in fleets. (eg, school maintains complete control of device)
* Verified boot via TPM helps ensure that software, updates and management of device can be trusted
* Device can be remote-wiped if lost, stolen, or eaten.
* Since devices are cloud based, all lessons, etc are on school's server, and thus replacing a child's broken, stolen, lost or eaten chromebook is very easy without disruptification.
* Chromebooks CAN now run Android apps, including the Play store.
* Of course, district can control ability to install additional apps. (Including the Play store for Android)
No wonder Chromebooks are so popular in this setting.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Including the hardcore right-wing reactionaries who type on Cyrillic keyboards and the alleged former liberals who preach to us from the pulpit of the Church of Enlightened Conservatism?
The OLPC was too Utopian.
"The internet changes everything!"
"Inexpensive computers levels the playing field for the poor!"
"We are innovators, we are freed from the constraints of outdated thinking!"
The problem of increasing opportunity, wealth and freedom in Lesser Developed Countries is huge. Negroponte thought he was on to something important, of that I have no doubt. And the pitch of being able to leap past the traditional hurdles was very appealing. I certainly bought it, for a while.
However smartphones turned out to be a much better solution. They are truly everywhere, even in those LDCs. Yet smartphones really are not an educational tool (meaning, you won't see them used as educational aids in classrooms).
And to the self-satisfied people here pushing "the market" as the obvious, and always correct answer. Even the market offers 1,000 solutions and 99.9% of them fail. The failure of OLPC does not automatically mean that OLPC was a dumb idea. You have to test ideas in the world of reality and let the weaker solutions fail, that notion is integral to the function of "the market".
Thus your smug reliance on corporate solutions is unappealing and logically problematic. Corporate answers require a market that can pay. Poor people have very limited ability to pay. The consequence is that corporate solutions often ignore the LDC market entirely, or market addictive (or low grade) garbage to them.
Anyone who doesn't realize that OLPC changed the world wasn't paying attention at the time. OLPC did not reach their very lofty goal of a laptop for every child, but to say that they did not influence the market (hence changing the world) is as hyperbolic as one laptop per child. Research and history, stay in school kids!
"The OLPC project could only benefit those where at least the teachers knew how to use computer. "
I don't think this is true at all. I was born in the 70s, and was basically the first generation to see 'personal computers' in public school classrooms in my area. Computer literacy as it concerns the population at large was an entirely different thing in the 80s than it is 30 years later. Back then, there were usually I would say, a couple smart kids in the classroom that in no time at all, and with no real help at all from teachers other than accessing the expensive devices, were far more knowledgeable about the computers than the adults. I would be surprised if this dynamic were not a significant explicit part of the historical discussion and development of OLPC. Thus the intent could have considered a lack of computer-savvy teachers as not a criticaly relevent issue. It wasn't with the comodore64 in my US public school classrooms in the 1980's, I doubt it was with OLPC deployments. Kids can be smarter than adults in more situations than you might think.
I have two of these from the give one get one program; my nieces and several neighborhood kids quite enjoyed playing with them when they were new and the nieces just had them out again over Easter break last month. Both still work fine, which is more than can be said for a lot of consumer garbage their age.
Craig Barrett and Bill Gates are hardly reliable witnesses in this matter as they both stood to lose greatly if the project had succeeded.
I still love the Pixel Xi screen!
(Later when they rebranded an Android tablet: that was pretty much garbage.)
Kids in 3rd world countries need drinking water, medicing/vaccines, food security, teachers and infrastructure not a something like this.
On the XO-1 we recommend that you restart Sugar every few hours, and especially after visiting the Background screen in My Settings. The leak is even more severe if the network view shows many icons.
C'mon.
Looks like they could have saved a lot of time and effort, and I only checked 1 major vendor. I'm sure others have similar.
7th Generation AMD E2-9000e Processor with Radeon R2 Graphics
Windows 10 Home 64-bit English
4GB, DDR4, 2400MHz; up to 16GB
32GB eMMC
The biggest predictor of the OLPC's "success" was the man who originated it: MIT Media Lab's Nicolas Negroponte.
MIT Media Lab is an organization seemingly dedicated to the creation of vaporware and/or over-hyped, under-performing tech that is inexplicably attached to a very solid engineering university.
However, the OS and software would have to be extremely well written to achieve OLPC's goals. There would also have to be a great deal of political goodwill and funding to successfully distribute and pay for the machines.
It's an amazing idea. I really hope an organization is able to do this at some point in the future.
The other thing potentially holding OLPC back is the ubiquity of the smartphone, which provides many of OLPC's killer apps, diminishing the potential usefulness of a next generation OLPC.
I remember when the concept was originally introduced. The main focus that I recall was that it was the easiest/cheapest way to provide textbooks. Regular textbooks were too expensive, so an inexpensive laptop could hold ALL the books a child would need for school. It wasn't meant to replace a Dell, or Lenovo laptop. It was meant to replace a stack of textbooks. The fact that it could also do other things was a bonus.
Citation desperately needed.
I do experiments and 3D printing always radically reduces the costs of the apparatus required, usually on the order of being 0.01 - 0.001 % of the cost without a 3D printer, it's absolutely ridiculous how cheap it makes it to do science experiments.
Um, you sure about that? I used to keep tabs on Space Nutters, I had a list of posts and users that definitely were "touched" in the brain. Read this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project
I said "people," not "plebs." What the masses do has never and will never constitute what Humanity does or considers, they are tools of the people with the resources to control them. They cheer for space colonization akin to The Expanse and asteroid mining because their masters want a backup plan for the Earth. They cheer for the riches without comprehension of the market effects because they have no concept of the market effects and that's a useful lie. It's like when a dictator convinces a bunch of idiotic mass of people they will get free shit if they help put the dictator in power - the fact they don't know it's a lie is irrelevant to the course of Humanity because if they did have the mental faculties to know it were a lie they would have been told something else.
I ordered the first model OLPC XO-1 at 4:00 AM opening day.
It was exciting, and the give-one-get-one idea made that $400 a reasonably altruistic purchase even though it was supposed to be a $100 computer.
The dual mode (reflective/backlit) screen was great but for a few stuck pixels. I didn't want to burden the project with my nitpicking so I kept it.
I really wanted to like it, and since I was a long-time Cyrix MediaGX processor user I thought that the evolved AMD Geode derivative should have been a performance boost.
It wasn't a slow laptop but the designed-by-committee Sugar desktop software crippled its performance dramatically. It sought to solve a problem nobody had with a solution nobody wanted. I optimized it as much as I could and eventually gave up and put a more conventional X Windows desktop on it and lost interest.
I still own it. The newer models didn't interest me once the Netbooks and Google Chromebooks came out.
Kriston
With a rasberry pi +lcd+keyboard
Edison invented the modern Research and Development lab. He was the first to develop and maintain a staff of people to develop things. Before his invention R&D was always an adjunct process.
They are 100 dollar notebooks available in the first world with 2 gigs of RAM and one of two 1366x768 displays in 10 or 12" varieties. Two usb ports and an sd card slot for memory. They are no frills, but exactly what a schoolkid would need. Furthermore they actually have all of their components available on the website for separate purchase, so if part of your notebook breaks, or you want to design something to fit inside the casing/components they already picked, you can.
Honestly the pine64 guys have done in about 2-3 years what OLPC hasn't in 12, and with a far smaller budget. Literally the only thing they need is a version of the OLPC handcrank and they would meet all but two goals: durability and olpc to olpc repeater mode.
True klingens! This article is written with bitchy 20/20 hindsight. At the time the biggest critics were huge companies like Apple, Intel and Microsoft who were pissed the OLPC wasn't using their proprietary technology who then turned around and tried to make their own knockoffs which 'failed' too.
Negroponte tried to make the world a better place. It didn't work but he tried and we learned a lot from it.
klingens is right about Netbooks too. The aftermath of the OLPC is even today you can get a really netbook for $200. No it wont play a 3D FPS but it'll do everything else. Despite what tepples says you can still get these though even though most 1st world consumers choose to pay a bit more.
Why is this Verge article getting so many hits? Because people love hate and seeing others fail. I say: Get a life!
I don't think the project failed at all.
It was quite an interesting and ambitious project at the time - the concept that a full PC could be manufactured for less than $1000. Many of us, at the time, said things like, "Think of all the cool things we could do with a laptop that only costs $100"... And you know, this was back when a laptop typically cost around $1000 or more, and was a complex computer.
Sure, it was ambitious, but it pushed the concept of a cheaper laptop for children far before anything in it's time, and first sub-$500 laptops came out.. Early small-screen devices with pretty good, if somewhat degraded performance.
And pretty soon the market realized that this was possible, and there was a market for it - cheaper laptops for kids and people who wouldn't otherwise use a computer.
So the market responded, and the capabilities that technology could bring changed. Smaller displays came out. Cheaper processors. Lower cost memory solutions. And people started buying these and pushing for embedded-able systems, and it happened.
Sure, OLPC as a product was a complete failure - they were like a pre-kickstarter project gone wrong - but they were the spark that lit the fire that continued to grow in intensity and they did succeed in one simply object just by existing - they re-aligned the market.
But, in a way, the vision they had wasn't lost. It was influenced, and it came to be... Just not with them.
So the end result was achieved by a failed project - which then brings up the question as to whether the project was to bring low-cost computers to children in third-world countries so they could change the world, or whether it was to sell laptops.
Because only one of those objectives wasn't achieved.
Of course, the Raspberry Pi was probably the spiritual successor to this concept and came out much later without the same fanfare and backslapping, but it did manage to succeed and change the world.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
and said it was obvious BS and just the MIT media lab's usual super hype/PR
those of us who said this at the time, and were scorned and derided, do we get even the hint of an apology
right, this is slashdot
I will update you on what is commercial today in India. We can get a 4G Jio phone(feature phone with video capabilities) for a deposit of around 25$(Rs 1500) refundable after 3 years.
see
https://www.jio.com/en-in/book-jio-phone
For less than a dollar per month you get unlimited voice calls and sms and 42GB data for less than 3$ per month. This is light years ahead of the OLPC and is successfully running as a commercial operation of very big size.
that they spent YEARS trying to design and manufacture extremely low power displays with new (and admittedly more reliable than current stock) light source designs.
Yes those displays were innovative. They were also extremely over-designed and unnecessarily sacrificed readability for power efficiency.
But the big problem is that using current stock displays would have allowed machines on the market instantly and cheaply, while inventing a new technology required years of wasted time and limited manufacturing and source options.
Over the years commodity stock displays overtook the OLPC screen technology in price and in some of the capabilities by extreme amounts anyway. The choice to create a new technology looks ever worse.
To get an idea of how weird the OLPC display was, instead of using light colored by filters and led peak colors, they used prisms that spread light from a white power source. And instead of choosing to use the three narrow color bands that are optimized for the peaks of the human visual system and are the only way to get saturated colors, they instead chose to use 4 color bands and use all the light, not just the peaks. Sure that probably improved the light efficiency by a large factor, but the result was an entirely novel display technology that looked horrible and would have no market outside the OLPC.
Similarly the fact that the display could also work in a reflective mode in black and white was innovative, but was all this worth adding 3 or 4 years to the development time and limiting manufacturing sources and driving up the price?
The choice of LEDs as a light source also made the light source more reliable than what was in use at the time. But stock display technologies eventually caught up with that.
Can't fix stupid.
Can't make Africans more intelligent than they are. Which is why Africa is the way it is.
Why isn't Africa making OLPCs for white countries? Or for Japan? Or for China? Could genes and intelligence have anything to do with it?
Or should we all just keep lying about reality?
And pretty soon the market realized that this was possible, and there was a market for it - cheaper laptops for kids and people who wouldn't otherwise use a computer.
Err no. The market for a cheap thing for kids is basically non-existant. The market was for a large portion of the working 3rd world. The kids benefitted of being in the same pricing category of a far larger and more desirable market.
To that end: This was just a natural course of capitalism. OLPC could never have existed (and let's face it, it pretty much didn't) and we would have been in the same place as we are now. They didn't invent a market, certainly didn't invent a profitable one, didn't invent minaturisation, and effectively did nothing that technology companies wouldn't naturally have gotten to anyway.
The world has a long history of tinkering with toys, miniturising, and lowering cost. This was nothing more than natural progression. OLPC was a great idea, but failed in execution partially because they were ahead of their time, and I would argue didn't leave any mark on the world.
...the OLPC idea was not bad at it's core, but the execution was poor and it eventually got replaced by commercial ideas. :P
First of all, historical perspective. This was over 10 years ago, couple of years before even Netbooks which also failed but was a commercial counter proposition of sorts.
Back then, we didn't have tablets, the first iPhone was still to be announced (it was launched in 2007 too), laptops were hugely expensive, and there was no de-facto option for cheaper kids oriented devices.
I think at most schools had some sort of partnership with Microsoft with a lab filled with older Windows Me PCs... which anyone can understand how crappy an experience that would be.
Problem at execution: It came as a grand announcement, one laptop for every kid in schools that needed it, accessibility for the masses, education, etc etc. But the execution failed. It was supposed to be 100 bucks, but that price quickly raised when the people behind it realized it was impossible, at the time, to make a durable laptop with enough power to be useful, given that it'd be passing through lots of students hands.
There were delays, partner conflicts, criticism on adoption of x or y hardware and software, some thoughts for and against going with open source stuff, etc etc etc.
Initial batches often got stolen or broken, the software experience and design was subpart in functionality, and in the end the project, from it's inception, was just a couple of years or so away from the explosion in popularity for smartphones, tablets, and whatnot.
Funding, which initially attracted lots of big players and names, soon ran dry.
Commercial counterparts that tried to match the pricing scheme also came out few years later... netbooks, EEE PCs (tabletops), among others.
Nowadays, with tablet and smartphone prices as they are, together with devboards and portable computers... it just doesn't make any sense anymore as a product category.
And I feel that the entire philosophy of OLPCs suffers from a plague in thinking that is still here to this day: the overestimation of a market often envisioned by tech savvy people, of folks that "don't need a whole lot from a computer". Chromebooks, underpowered devices, Linux boxes, stick computers, plus a whole bunch of other stuff fits the same product category.
You see, a whole ton of people think that there is this huge vast market of non-computer savvy people for which an underpowered device will do more than enough. I've never seen concrete numbers on this, but there is always some project somewhere of devices targeted for those.
But more often than not, it's exactly these supposedly non-tech savvy consumers that will always have one specific but strong need for a computer that takes them away from this imaginary category. The market is way more complex than that. It's not only what they might use a computer for, it's the network of support, the learning rate, the environment the device is inserted on, niche needs, usability cases, accessory and peripheral compatibility, specific software, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that will really tell if a product will fit someone's needs or not.
I'm saying this as someone who fell into the "it's enough" trap over and over again until I realized it was a waste of money. My mom is borderline computer illiterate. She uses it for work as a real estate agent, and for the longest time her needs were around e-mail checking, browsing, and typing Word stuff.
So the EEE PC, older desktops and laptops of mine, tiny computers and others are actually on the list of stuff I tried getting from my mom. She currently has my older iPad 2, a Kangaroo PC, and she had several of my older smartphones until I got her an LG Stylus G4, which is now being replaced for a Xiaomi Mi A1 Android One edition.
You see, I have realized that when you are thinking of hardware for people like her, you need to think about the needs on a micro and macro scale. Sometimes, not being tech savvy enough implies needing more hard