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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. [...]
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
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.
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.
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
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
They still aren't. The OLPC is unique and not meant primarily for "western" countries:
- it can run on very little power
- can create mesh network with other OLPCs
- can be used in direct sunlight (special display)
- it can be powered with a hand generator
- it is actually very inexpensive (the online price includes second laptop for a child in developing countries)
- it's OS is designed for learning, sources in python are available easily for any OS component (Linux with Sugar as far as I remember)
I keep seeing major misconception about the OLPC as just another cheap notebook - it is much more then that.
I hope good times will come for the OLPC project.