Cheap Laptops Are Planned for Kids – NEWS – TECHNOLOGY – Comcast.net — If this thing costs $110 to build how is it a $100 Laptop? It would have to sell for at least $330 to break even as a retail product. This is pure flummery! Typical MIT Media Lab BS. The idea is noble, but the result will be cruel, you watch.
MIT Media Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte, who unveiled the textbook-sized laptop on Wednesday, said he expects to sell 1 million of them to Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria.
Negroponte did not say who would build the machine, which will cost $110 to make, but at least five are considering bids to do so. He said a commercial version may be available at a higher price to subsidize machines provided to children.
The laptop will run on an open-source operating system, such as Linux, which is generally cheaper than proprietary systems such as Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, said Negroponte.
The devices will be lime green in color, with a yellow hand crank, to make them appealing to children and to fend off potential thieves.
Well I have to agree with something I read earlier today – that color will make you blind after a few hours, so I hope they change it to something more eye-friendly. A bright color is great if you drop it somewhere and want it to be easy to find, but in places with a lot of vegetation well, that’s not gonna happen. If you want a bright color for that reason, make it yellow, like the Garmin etrex and other outdoors electronics.
As for the price, well, if they don’t go into the upgrade madness maybe a time will come when it costs 10 bucks a pop…
The biege ones will be $330, its the lime green ones that will be $100 and no one will buy them…Brilliant marketing!!
It’s intent is NOT to be a consumer product. The intent is for governments to buy these to give them to the poor.
However, I totally agree. This WILL flop.
Though I think this may achieve some use the other side of the Digital Divide — the funniest of the publicity demos happened at the UN, the other day. No one told Kofi Annan this was a mock-up and he tried to turn the generator crank handle to see if a kid could handle it.
It broke off!
Lime green = bad. On a good note, you could throw up on it with little fear of social mockery.
So long as it gets the attention in these countries, I don’t see how it will faulter. It will obviously be a non-profit activity… the question remains if these gents can run a business as well as they build low cost computers.
$100.00 will get you a used Palm and a couple of spare batteries. The old Palm will be much more powerfull, and portable. As far as a hand crank so you can use it where there is no power…what exactly is someone in the position going to need a computer for? As their bloated, frozen, starved, and dehydrated bodies decompose we can pass the $100.00 laptop on to the next child. Maby it they bundle it with some blankets and food it could do some good.
OK. The machines will ship in February or March, yet they don’t even have a functional prototype to show the Secretary-General of the UN?
Also, at least 5 are considering bids to make the machine. That means that they don’t even have a manufacturer lined up.
They will not make it by March, and likely won’t make it for $110.
There is no new technology here; it’s a production problem (not to mention distribution, even if they’re free).
They may be smart at MIT, but I’ll be surprised if they have any idea how to get a product out the door.
This whole thing looks suspiciously like a PR gimmick.
“The devices will be lime green in color, with a yellow hand crank, to make them appealing to children and to fend off potential thieves.”
Is the hand crank extra heavy?
in any case I assume the idea is that information is the great equalizer. I don’t know if this version has net connectivity but even if they came with an encyclopedia preinstalled, this would be a step in the right direction.
Are these laptops too girly for your taste? 😉
PR gimmick? Hmm…how unexpected.
Everyone is SO cynical about this but why? JD’s comment implies that the machine is meant to be sold for a profit. But anyone who has followed this story knows that the goal is distribution at cost in VERY large numbers. Purchasers would be expected to be governments or very large benefactors. This might not be the most pressing need for the developing world but it might have surprising consequences. Perhaps not surprisingly, I detect a real disconnect here the moment something doesn’t fit a standard capitalist development model. Give these guys credit. They’re trying something different. This can’t possibly hurt anyone, might change some lives and, who knows, might eventually have commericial implications, too.
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/news.html
The point here is to have something to help students learn.
Suspend your desire to make a buck for a moment. These devices have the ability to bring technology and knowledge to poor areas of the world. This is a device that couldn’t have been produced for $200 bucks last year. They will be able to meet the goal of the $100 computer for the masses.
As a person who works for/with non-profits for the poor, I have to wonder about the viability of this project. But still, I salute their goals and vision and hope this works.
Almost always… LOCAL sourcing works much better. Otherwise you’re at high risk for expensive, irrelevant, disastrous boondoggles like Halliburton rebuilding Iraq.
If I were assigned this effort, my first thought would be to set up factories around the developing world to build turn-key Linux-boxes.
Maybe they could use cast-off computer components from the developed world but certainly they could hire local people.
Even better than Linux would be to get Bill Gates (or Melinda!) to donate a version of Windows for the developing world.
We disagree on this one. I think it’s a great idea. Time will tell. As for it not making a profit………. it’s not supposed to. :-/
I live in Brazil and I don’t think we need this computer. For one thing, there are electrical power in most of the country, so that handle is just comical and the cheapest computers here in Brazil sell for around $400.
The poor don’t want crappy, ugly computers, they want credit, so they can buy a computer with their own money and pay a small monthly payment.
There are also a lot of governmental and private programs building community computer centers around the country. These centers usually have 10 or 20 computers running Linux, Openoffice and other free software.
What we need is better schools and regular books. The teachers are underpaid, books are expensive and there are a huge lack of good public libraries in this country. The government recently cut taxes on books and started a program to build libraries and improve existing ones around the country.
GregAllen,
Bill Gates won’t donate anything. Here in Brazil the government started a program to sell cheap computers to the poor. They cut taxes, offered finnancing and the computer industrie agreed to lower their profits in exchange.
The computers would come with Linux only. MS complained that Windows should be an option and offered something they called “Windows XP Starter Edition”, a crappy, crippled Windows that can’t open more than 3 simultaneous windows. Fortunately the government didn’t accepted and the boxes are Linux only.
When the government started building community computer centers, where poor people would have access to computers and to the internet, MS did the same thing, trying to SELL software. Now most of those centers are using Linux and OpenOffice. The irony is that the future Brazillian workforce are being trained in Open source tools because Microsoft is short-sighted and couldn’t see the future.
Despite the color, it is a good product. We can’t compare it to what we have, for poor kids in third world countries, this will be a big thing. And the $110 building cost will come down once it’s done by millions of units…
I hate to go all left wing, especially around here, but…
Shouldn’t we give the poor electricity, food, water, shelter, and clothing first?
Mr Dvorak, although usually I enjoy your sharp-witted, cynical comments, I think you are a little uninformed here.
– the $100 is a goal. Negroponte is using that as marketing. You know the drill there as well as anyone. But he has also said that $100 is what they were aiming at, and he hopes to lower the price in later revisions. This is antithetical to what the computer marketplace has been doing for the last few years – there we have seen more powerful computers come in at the same price points. Heavily bloated software has necessitated the increase in power. Negroponte seems to be to be proposing a model under which power would stay roughly the same, and the price would drop. (This however seems a problem: users will always want, if not more bloat in the software, at least the ability to do more things – such as multimedia.)
– Negroponte has said that if this were a commercial product, it would cost $225. The $100 – or $115, or whatever it ends up being at its first go-round – is at cost with no markup at all. Negroponte has further said that several commercial companies are talking to MIT about commercial versions (to sell at something like that $225).
– It is hard to say whether this will fly or not. I wish them all the luck, though. I would be interested in a ruggedized hand-cranked field laptop.
The MIT computers are likely colored lime green for the same reason that spare tires are often pink in rental cars – so that no one will steal them.
But – $199 will already get you a Linux desktop at Walmart.com.
Wouldn’t it be better to donate an obsolete, off lease, commercial PC than send it to the landfill. Machines of less than 1Ghz typically have less value than the cost of certified disposal of the carcus. Even a 500Mhz machine will run a simple Linux browser. $100 should cover the shipping of a dozen systems.
The 3 man computer. One to wind the crank, one to hold it steady, and
one to type?
To mike cannali… you said:
“Wouldn’t it be better to donate an obsolete, off lease, commercial PC than send it to the landfill. Machines of less than 1Ghz typically have less value than the cost of certified disposal of the carcus. Even a 500Mhz machine will run a simple Linux browser. $100 should cover the shipping of a dozen systems.”
I’ve done this and all I can say is it is a heck of a lot harder to ship containers of old computers to other countries than it looks. I worked on a team that did this and we were literally fixing computers every night. Then, we got to meet with some dodgy government people who wanted to know if we were going to use old 486’s to build weapons of mass destruction (we were not). At least one container was stopped by customs. So… yes, it is possible, but regulations, shipping, etc. make it a serious pain in the ass and not as productive as distributing new, durable, wireless laptops.
I generally consider this blog’s author, and its reader to be smarter than the average guy, but holy crap are there some stupid posts here in this article. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people totally miss the point on an issue. “Getting out” is not a high point, I see.
Its not a profitable product because it was never designed to be. Nothing the UN does is profitable. That’s not the point. If you don’t understand this…I have no clue at all how to explain it to you.
If you don’t like the green, that’s fine, nobody reading this is in line to get one, I’m sure. Saying it will wreck you eyes is just silly though.
This is *way* better than a Linux box made of discarded American techno-trash. Its an all-in-one design with flash instead of and HD, etc. Giving a million people their first computer in a million different configurations would be the biggest tech support melt-down in history. Half the machines would be broke in a month, with nobody within hundreds of miles being able to fix them. There is no Best Buy where these things are headed. You would need a system that you can build, donate, and forget about for years, and have it still work. A Commodore 64 with bulk storage, pretty much. There are reasons NASA didn’t send x86 Linux gear (or anything like it) to Mars, and similar reasons dictate this design.
I don’t know much about Brazil, but from what I’ve read the last thing they need is more debt.
I must say though that I do question why people who don’t even have a phone need a computer instead of food, housing, public works, medicine, etc. I do think that the 3rd world needs to fill the information gap if they are ever to free themselves from the 1st world, but it does seem that there are more pressing needs. Maybe this is one of those things where you have to stop pouring water on the fire long enough to stop the other guy from pouring gas on it, but what Nigeria really needs, IMO, is an organized AIDs vaccine bootlegging model.
I’m not sure this project makes any sense, but your guys’ complains are far stupider than the original idea.
OK, I’m done bitching, you can go back to browsing New Egg for $110 sticks of RAM, and $2000 monitors.
I hope these tots don’t get internet access with this. They’ll have root kits installed before they know how to type.
Are we really doing them any favors to introducing them to computing just as America is realizing that using CD-ROMS and the Internet are intrinsically insecure?
Before we get any further down this road, maybe we need to rethink the whole thing and make sure that on the internet people have to know whether you’re a dog, whether you’ve had your rabies shots, and who to call if you get picked up chasing cars.