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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 $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. [...]
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
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 "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
probably don't need a computer of any type. They need nutrition, and sanitation, and a clean water supply.
Oh, don't be so selfish. There are many kids in 3rd world countries who could benefit from the enhanced opportunities that computers could bring them to learn and communicate. The countries are 3rd world because of less economic development, and show me the children of a country, and I'll show you the future of a country's economy, business, science, and industry.
Many of the kids in 3rd world countries don't necessarily lack the necessary nutrition, sanitation, or clean water for survival, And the internet could help provide them empowering information or support needed to help more people in those countries become more effective, more intellectually capable to do science and tackle problems, more industrious, or better their community in other ways.
I am the crank attached to my laptop.
Nullius in verba