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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 $100 android tablets.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
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".
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 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.
While smart phones and cellular (or wireless) connectivity have brought computing and the wealth of knowledge that is the internet to people who previously did not have access to it, they don't provide a way for those people to develop for those platforms. Trying to create an Android app on an Android phone is a non-starter for most people. Although OLPC wasn't successful, I believe that the idea behind the project is still important.
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.
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?
The grand idea at the time was to get those people the information needed to lift themselves up. The OLPCs were intended to have an offline copy of Wikipedia as an example. The real-world problems tend to get solved quickly and cheaply when people can get information on how to purify water, farm more effectively, etc.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Windows 8 came out 7 years after this prototype was showed off tough - many things happened in those years.
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
That was the design phase, the crank never went into production.
It is not economically or practically feasible for us or even all the 1st world nations put together to "solve" their problems; the BEST we could ever reasonably hope to do is to empower people in those countries to solve the problems within their communities.
There already are charities focused on bringing food and water to people, it's OK for a different charity to start up and offer education. And FWIW I met one group who were setting up pumps and wells and it seemed like they were doing it more for the sake of allowing people to colonize new areas than for the sake of improving people's lots in areas where they were already living. There a lot in the mix.
Nullius in verba
I think it's "el boatload".
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.
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+
Don't build them schools, they are not handicapped. Given them the economic incentive to build schools and send their kids to them.
Certified fair trade is a better way to get kids into schools than just putting up a building.
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.
You mean like the Pi-Top? Inspired by OLPC if you look at it, it costs a LOT more than $100, even today with all the production in full swing and the costs greatly subsidised by having sold millions of units.
The hand-cranked power supply is literally a bolt-on item with a Trevor Bayliss (RIP) clockwork mechanism, basically, but at further cost.
Honestly, you can't get a Pi, working, with a stable power supply, storage, a screen (generally the most expensive bit) and something to contain it for under $100. Certainly not that would be safe and reliable and durable enough and available in such countries.
Sorry but mentioning a price was ALWAYS a mistake. There wasn't a country on earth willing to pay what was actually necessary to get what was actually promised, but you could have made a hand/solar/dropping-weight powered laptop that operated in some fashion for that price easily. Just not what they promised. Or you could have made a laptop as promised and try to get people to subsidise it.
The problem, as ever, was that there was no actual need for it. Places where OLPC could succeed could have done a lot more for that money - like just hiring a teacher for a lot less, which would give the teacher a job, and the kids their own "computer" in the classroom to teach them.
It was always a half-hearted pipe-dream, and it never gained traction at any point. The RPi come out and nobody even connected the two in their head because OLPC was already dead by then.
Yep. It was so good that nobody even copied it for e-readers, even from the transition to B&W e-ink screens to colour LCDs.
Because... and this is critical... it was shit and cost too much.
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
Agreed, Its not an either or, you should have both. But the laptop will empower the mind of a young kid, even if he doesn't have water or food, he will still be able to believe.
The kid can't built a well or have the means to get fresh water to their state, that is a larger higher up problem, quite above the means of the kids.
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
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.
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?
even a $500 smart phone is beyond the reach of the children
. . . Even? As in that price-tag for a phone is... low?
And can you imagine trying to write anything beyond a tweet on a smart phone keyboard?
If only we had the technology...
How about we solve those problems for everyone on the planet first, instead of putting the cart before the horse?
Because that's fucking BULLSHIT. You're suggesting we HALT all development other than the water, food, and shelter.
FURTHERMORE, congratulations, we HAVE / ARE solving those problems. BOOM.
There are LESS places with LESS people in those situations than there has been for hundreds of years. That's not percentage-based either, I mean absolutely. TIMES ARE GOOD.
Why would you want to bar the poor from having high technology? Why keep them down in the dirt? What would motivate you to even suggest that?
and said it was obvious BS and just the MIT media lab's usual super hype/PR
those of us who said this at the time, and were scorned and derided, do we get even the hint of an apology
right, this is slashdot
I will update you on what is commercial today in India. We can get a 4G Jio phone(feature phone with video capabilities) for a deposit of around 25$(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.
Wait, what ?
You mean, Internet has Ads now ?
Wow.
aaaaaaa
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