Sugar needs more dough! OLPC's $100 Laptop now $200
So it’s official. The $100 laptop now costs $200 and that too, in quantities of 10,000 units. It’s really sad to see a great intellect such as Prof. Negroponte’s being wasted on this project. Before his One-Laptop-Per-Child project could even come close to producing units in any real quantity, with a much shorter development effort, both Intel and Asus have come out with devices that exhibit superior performance, are available in quantities of one and cost about the same when you factor in a volume order. Tsk Tsk. One really can’t figure out where the innovation is in this project. Is it the handcrank to charge the laptop? An invention that was commercialised in the 1930s and is available in dozens or form factors and power ratings? Or is it the Linux operating system? Which already has hundreds of distros customized for every task, including education? Or, perhaps, the peer to peer network, which was commercialized in less expensive devices almost a decade prior to the OLPC and is available in Microsoft Windows in a far more sophisticated manifestation.
What exactly is novel about this project other than the fact that a number of brilliant minds from MIT have been expended to meet a target that will not be met any sooner than it would have been had this project not happened at all. Imagine the things Prof. Negroponte and his team would have come up with if they had spent the last few years doing what they do best, innovating ground breaking concepts that lie at the nexus of computer science, artificial intelligence, media and robotics/mechatronics. It really pains me to imagine the opportunity cost that has been paid to pursue what can only be called, “Nick’s folly”.
We wish you well, Prof. Negroponte. And we hope you can get the price down to $100 soon. For no reason other than the fact that once this goal has been met, hopefully you will call it a day as far as the Sugar/OLPC project goes and move on to more useful and exciting pursuits.
December 15th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
[...] catastrophe to catastrophe. Initially, they weren’t able to meet the $100 target and ended up being close to $200. Then some key countries that Mr. Negroponte was trying to win over – including Pakistan – decided [...]
March 25th, 2008 at 7:40 am
[...] low-cost computing in general. We’ve discussed emerging low-cost hardware platforms like the OLPC, the Eee PC and the Cloudbook in the past. All of these machines have a few hundred megs of RAM and [...]
December 15th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
[...] years ago and after much wrangling with corporations, the loss of his CTO and other staffers, and cost over-runs, the OLPC Sugar still hasn’t quite hit that $100 number. For a while, the Pakistan Government [...]
December 30th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Some very interesting and insightful thoughts. I like this.^_^ because I have a blog about laptops too.
January 20th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
It might seem logical, the way you presented, that OLPC has better alternatives at cheaper costs, yet you have overlooked a key point in the overall philosophy behind OLPC Project.
Nicholas just wanted the toys given in hands of children to be different and more ‘toy like’. OLPC serves to motif in the right manner! The toy shaped mini laptop has several tools that can keep the young ones busy exploring new stuff!
Even if Nicholas didnt achieve his dream, he has done a great job by presenting this whole idea! Somehow, the competitors have been forced to cut down laptop prices and target the students …. In a nutshell, your suggestion that they should have done work in robotics/mechatronics etc seems illogical!
January 20th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
What do you mean by ‘illogical’? How is it so… care to expound?
Also, please note that Negroponte didn’t start the price reduction trend in the industry. That has been going on for decades. None of the innovations that the OLPC came up with have been used in any mainstream netbook to reduce cost. If they had come up with a really cheap way to make LCDs that was actually adopted by the industry to reduce prices across the board, I would count that as a direct contribution or success. The fact is that their hardware/software innovations weren’t adopted by anyone and the price reduction trend overtook their ability to ship product.
If Negroponte had instead advised groups of students at the Media Lab in diverse areas such as those I have highlighted above, the net scientific/technological contribution would have probably been far greater than what was achieved by the OLPC.
February 24th, 2010 at 7:12 am
[...] Originally Posted by XiNiX The Product u r referring was a "supported" initiative by GoV of India and more of a student project of engineering students blessed by a company and ministry of education, but never intended for a commercial approach. btw this is the real pic : Everything you have said above is incorrect. My friend, the picture you've provided is not the Sakshit laptop and has nothing to do with India. This is the Sugar laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC initiative. The Sakshit non-laptop was nothing other than propaganda nonsense and didn't have a display, any real processing capability or any other laptop-like capabilities for that matter! it was like an over-glorified storage device. In contrast, you might want to take a look at the ultra-low cost Sirius computer developed in Pakistan: FiveRivers Technologies Please do some basic reading before posting such patently false information. Here is more information on the Sugar laptop: Sugar needs more dough! OLPC's $100 Laptop now $200 | TechLahore [...]