That's right... the folks at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a very capable laptop computer for distribution to children across the world. Millions of these units are planned to be distributed to the world's poor children as a personal learning tool.

The laptops are supposed to have 1 Gb of storage and will allow up to 4 USB connections. The bad news? You can't buy these. All units manufactured are part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organization.

Link: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/



P.S. Talk about kewl!!! That qualifies for the unit and the programme.

Are they morons?! Holy shit these things would sell like nothing else.

If they want to give them away free to poor kids, they should sell them to everyone else, their funding would be covered in no time.

I'd have to agree, these things would sell like blue blazes. Except that they are probably going to loose money in the process. The $100 is probably their cost. Maybe if they fulfill their goal of one per child, they'll consider selling them.

Can you see it now? Adults taking away their children's computers?

500 Mhz, 1 GB? That really wouldn't sell all that well in the United States, would it?

I'd buy one. I'd just want it as a portable word processor, so I could plug it into my desktop and transfer notes.

Wow, yeah. That probably will be a problem if this goes through. Bet they haven't even thought of it.

Well I wouldn't expect them to sell them for cost to the open market, a mark-up is to be expected. But even $200 for something like this is a great deal. They could probably put it about $125 and make some serious cash.

I doubt that most would though. I don't think many people want a whole bunch of machines around, they'd rather get it all customizable in a single entity. Kinda like a normal laptop.

One could also point out that memory could be greatly increased with all those USB ports, but again, people pay for ease, and thats not all that easy for anything beyond being a typewriter.

It's a capital-consideration. Most people would like that, yes, but that costs upwards of a thousand dollars. For a hundred, a functional piece like this is pretty nice.

This isn't targeted at the people with huge wads of cash to throw around, those people are quite few.

People pay for functionality, first and foremost, this isn't a computer designed to fulfill a broad area of uses, it's mostly for reading and inputting information. There are lots of people who would find such an instrument very handy, myself included.

But you can get a Dell Laptop for about 450 dollars (after saveings). That means a 1.7 Ghz speed and at least 20 GB of memory. Anyone really looking into a computer probably wouldn't find this all that helpful. Anyone with the cash to buy more than one comptuer, and use this as a moblie platform (but don't want to buy a laptop for some reason) could, yes, use this.

But I still don't think they'd fly off the market all that fast.

Look at it this way, they're going to be producing these things anyway. It can only be good for them to sell them to on the market in addition to the at-cost program for poor kids in other countries.

Wouldn't that put an undue strain on the production if their real goal is to supply these to children?

It shouldn't. Sounds like they've got companies scrambling to provide them with production capacity (they know it's a good opportunity). If they get enough market orders, it's not hard to boost production, and it helps them fund the charity program too.

Well.....

No, I have to agree with what they are doing and how they are going about it. If their plan was to make a cheap underpowered computer availible to everyone, then no, but that doesn't seem to be it. And anyways, just wait a few years till a few million of these are made. ;)

That's the bit I based my statement on, not sure if you're disagreeing with me or what...

Y'all bring up some interesting points for consideration. Gotta tell say though, the rules change a bit when you're producing something to distribute freely.

The first is, apparently they are serious about this program. And to build at least a million of them, we're talking about 100 million smackaroos. So they have already built one... they know what parts are needed. Not sure what they plan to do from a service standpoint, but if their main priority is getting them into children's hands... then producing additional replacement units may be the plan.

The reason that many computer companies do not produce hundreds of thousands of units or more is the advances that are occuring. These advances seem to be slowing a bit, but with continuing miniaturization, it's hard for a company seeking profits to invest largely into any kind of holding inventory... especially on chips. So this rule will be overlooked... it's not for profit on these give-away laptops.

If this unit is going to be produced into the millions, they are going to buy up millions of the necessary RAM and motherboards. This means that manufacturers will extend their normal production levels to meet the demand. Others that produce the LCD displays will also ramp up to meet the ordering levels. Assembly will continue to run for however many months needed.

I'm wanting to assume that since they already cost it out for each unit, they've already got commitments or contracts for production. As for retail sales, time and effort (read "money") would have to be spent in finding re-sellers, signing agreements, storing products in the warehouses, trying to forecast the amount of demand, filling orders and distributing the goods, marketing and advertising costs, etc, etc, etc. So the profit margin really wouldn't justify it, since it would only recoup part of the total expenses of the program while increasing the total expenditure of people-hours and other resources.

It seems like a great idea... and yeah, for children with no computers, I see this as a means of them using it for learning while interacting with "a" computer. Yes, it'd be a wonderful tool for inputing information like notes or writing papers/letters like with a word processor. Whatever they plan to use for learning materials will probably be done via USB flash memory. The port also gives them some functionality for printers, scanners and access to networks.

It's not about a viable solution for college students or young professionals. IT probably has some features that would make it better than a palm-pilot. It may have others that aren't as nice. It's aimed to be given to young children, to acquiant them with technology, to get them to start using it, to learn typing... all sorts of things we kind of take for granted with our computer systems.

And yeah, I think if I had $100 and a chance to get one, I'd probably buy one versus a new internal hard drive (which I need really, really bad). And yeah, there would probably be a big demand for it... since right around the 100-dollar mark, people kinda get excited about what it can buy (like an i-Pod Shuffle or Sony Net-MD player).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20051214/tc_pcworld/123921

They picked someone to make it now.

The very first post included a link. After discovering something about give one/get one on laptops, dug a little deeper. The link I'd discovered is this: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

It is where you give one laptop to a child somewhere in the world and you get one for your own child (or ownself if we aren't grown up yet!). When I revisited the link above to make a new post on this topic, it went to the same programme.

It looks like the $100 laptop is actually a $200 when you buy the one, you get one free for $399. It is made by AMD, basically and uses the Linux OS. It automatically picks up on other units nearby and comes with wireless access via Wi-Fi.

Not sure how successful the program shall become. Yet I guess they knew people here wanted to be able to get the same thing that was being sent out. At least according to some that posted here on this thread.

Check it out.

Wow. That is one snazzy laptop. I'd like one for when we homeschool our son.

If you visit the URL listed in the Quote's by-line, you'll see a screen shot of what the bootup OS looks like.

As it turns out, they have a special Give1Get1 programme. They sponsored it on Nov 12, 2007 for two weeks. They look to re-start the second go-round (G1G1v2) the seventeenth (17th) of this month.

This is per the Wiki article, about half way down the page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child