$100 Laptop

Hi Cyrus, 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…

Reuters: Potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop due to be rolled out to millions, according to Craig Barrett, ECO of Intel. Schoolchildren in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria will begin receiving the first few million textbook style computers from the MIT Media Lab run by Nicholas Negroponte from early 2006. “Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop — I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” Barrett,…

Indian Economist Atanu Dey: I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child” is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.” You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of…

A thought in response to your Slate article and the more practical Inveneo stuff. The latter relies on 12V DC for the good reasons that it’s been made ubiquitous by the car and truck industry, the gear is simple and tough, and big economies of scale have already been made. Why then does every new DC gadget call for a different voltage and its own transformer? Big purchasers like the Pentagon or the Indian government could push the industry towards…

This one came in before the one this morning: Hello, My name is Samir Raiyani and I am a Senior Scientist at SAP Research in Palo Alto. I really liked your article on Slate about Negroponte’s $100 computer idea. I had written exactly along the same lines on my blog – even pointing to the silly Simputer idea. My angle was slightly different and would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks, Samir > Samir, > > Thanks so much for…

A reader named Trent Krupp left this comment on my blog this morning: I read your article on Slate today and felt that it was poorly researched with a fundamental lack of understanding as to what the $100 laptop is meant to do. While there are numerous errors of reasoning, a few that you should personnally look into are the real purposes of the WIFI adapter (hint: Ad-hoc networks are what is envisioned, not infrastructural networks). Also the mention of…

DigiTimes (via Lee Thorn of the Jhai Foundation) : Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, and Inventec, which are reportedly bidding to manufacture the world’s cheapest notebook distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives, consider that meeting the volume shipment schedule for the US$100 notebook would be “unlikely” given the current technical hurdles that need to be overcome.

Slate: By Cyrus Farivar Posted Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005, at 3:31 PM ET At the World Summit on the Information Society two weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the laptop he believes will digitize the developing world. The cute green computer sports a WiFi card, a 500 MHz processor, a 1 gigabyte flash drive, and a novel power source—a 6-inch hand crank that juts out from the side. It will run free, open-source software, most likely some derivation of Linux.…