$100 laptop follow up
Last year we wrote rather sceptically about the plans of Nicholas Negroponte to produce a $100 laptop.
From an educational point of view we doubted the basic premise, that simply giving out hardware (in this case a low-power laptop) was a practical way to bridge the digital divide in third world countries. As part of our story we interviewed renowned British inventor Trevor Baylis, who had been invited by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative to view their work. Mr Baylis was less than impressed, particularly with the idea that a wind up mechanism could produce sufficient power.
In what must have been OLPC’s least trumpeted announcement, they have now admitted that they have had to increase their cost estimates by 35% - to $135. However, they still maintain that they can hit the magic $100 target by 2008 - if they have produced 100m units! Oddly, they have now also admitted that building an inexpensive laptop is less of a challenge than getting it to run on 1 watt of electricity. When Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, launched the prototype at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in Jan 2006, he managed to quickly break the handle that is used to generate the laptop’s power. Unfortunately, this failure was overlooked by most of those who reported the launch and is perhaps a metaphor for a project which could be revolutionary, but which seems to value PR hype more than building practical, deliverable technology.
Undeterred, OLPC has chosen Taiwanese Quanta Computers to build the $135 laptop. Quanta are the world’s largest laptop manufacturer (along with several other lines of electrical products) with a turnover of US$10bn.