From the Mailbag

Three thoughts on your excellent “skeptical inquiry” into Negroponte’s $100 computer.

A. You probably haven’t enough gray hair to remember the Timex Sinclair. More a stunt than a computer, but reached cult popularity with those who enjoy the challenge of writing TIGHT programs. Here’s a website with a jpeg of it being well-used as a doorstop!

B. To be fair, I’m imagining that Negroponte isn’t projecting today’s costs/components, but counting on continued leaps in integration and reductions in price. Hard to remember today that the Apple II, pre-GUI, sold for $2,600 with 48K RAM, and still had a tape drive! (And those were 1977 dollars! Compare Compaq’s bottom-of-the-line today at $600.)

C: There’s always plenty of room at the bottom. With India graduating 100,000 highly-trained, English-speaking engineers ANNUALLY (compare to the US where the Dems recently proposed graduating these many over the next five or six years was it?), it’s unlikely rapidly expanding nations like China and India will remain near the bottom long. In fact, they’ve captured most of our manufacturing already. There’s an iPod headed my way from Shanghai as I type. But even if we ignore the fact that both countries retain vast untapped reservoirs of low-wage displaced traditional farmers, China and India can indeed outsource profitably. Africa remains far below them in wage-scales even as the demand for cellular technology skyrockets there. Perhaps the next Hong Kong or Mumbai will be Lilongwe or Mombasa? And since they’ll already have those powerful, state-of-the-art pda/cell phones, maybe the best way to provide computing to Africa’s kids will be dumb keyboards and displays that they can attach to their parent’s pda/phones? Li-ion batteries and chargers, already are more available than rural electrification in the Third World. Paging Mr. Negroponte!