U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project

[OhioChick]

Source: Reuters India

Fri Apr 27, 2007 5:28 AM IST

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A project that aims to deliver low-priced laptops with string pulleys to the world's poorest children may have a new market: U.S. schools.

The nonprofit "One Laptop per Child" project said on Thursday it might sell versions of its kid-friendly laptops in the United States, reversing its previous position of only distributing them to the poorest nations.

"We can't ignore the United States. ... We are looking at it very seriously," Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who founded the project, told analysts and reporters.

Once known as the $100 laptop, the lime-green-and-white devices are inching up in price. In February, the project estimated said they would sell for $150 each. Negroponte now puts their price tag at $176 apiece.

They would go at a higher price to U.S. schools, he said, because more resources are invested in American education than in developing nations, even in the poorest U.S. regions.



Read more: http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-04-27T052133Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-295844-1.xml

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Here's a suggestion

Market them to consumers at, say, $300.

Dedicate the profits to the $100 World Laptop Computer Initiative.

That $100 price would ideally be dependent on local wages. Most parents of kids in Brookline, MA or Chestnut Hill, PA, are able to pay consumer prices; go to North Philly or South Boston, and bring the price down; kids (and even adults) in Sudan should get them free of charge.

--p!

[Xithras]

2. Not many "non-poor" would buy them.

They won't run any games or software you can buy in a store, the web browser is stripped down and can't be changed out to anything else without hacking the source code (it's Fedora underneath, but they've made the CL very hard to access). It has only 1 gig of Flash storage, no hard drive, no floppy drive, and no CDROM drive.

These laptops were designed to make technology accessible to those who can't afford anything better. Anyone who CAN afford better, will do so. I just recently paid $800 for a brand new Core Duo equipped laptop with a 17" screen and accessories up the wazoo, and it makes the OLPC laptops look like doorstops. Nobody who can afford any kind of real laptop would consider purchasing an OLPC laptop. That's why the "subsidy" model won't work. It's been suggested many times before, but the specs on the machine are so low that very, very few people would consider buying one.

They're a great solution when used as they were intended...as a way to bring technology to the technology-free and close the digital divide. They're not very useful for anyone else.

[Lance_Boyle]

3. Does your fancy new c2d-based lappie have a hand-crank? ;-)

The appeal of the OLPC goes far beyond the specs... it's a geek toy that a large number of people would love to play with - and hack. And the subsidy model is already in place - the OLPC will be sold (in US market, not sure about EU) at twice the finalized price. Unfortunately, the now-$360 price tag makes it slightly less attractive than it would have been at $200.

[Xithras]

4. I thought they canned the hand crank?

I haven't been following the OLPC project lately, but the last I'd heard, they scrapped the hand crank in favor of a small pedal operated model. They were having issues with the torque from the cranking action screwing up the case.

But no, no hand crank. I have a solar panel, inverter, and deep cycle battery that can be used in a pinch though :)

[w4rma]

6. Solar panel for a laptop? I haven't heard about those before. (nt)

[SayWhatYo]

5. I had the software for that running on vmware...

It was very user-unfriendly.

It's linux based, btw...