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TECHNOLOGY | Noah Brier

$100 Laptop

Donate a not-yet-$100 laptop and get one for yourself.

December 17, 2007 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 3 COMMENTS

hundred dollar laptop

Until the end of the year the One Laptop Per Child program is giving allowing regular folks to buy the laptop as long as they donate one as well (the program has actually been going since the beginning of November I believe). While many have questioned the program and it's hit some significant bumps in the road, it seems to be doing better. Although the non-profit has seen recent competition from for-profit manufacturers, as Grant McCracken rightly pointed out, that's not such a bad thing.

To quote Grant, "We could argue that Intel and Microsoft are rushing this market precisely because they were terrified that the first one in could own it. And this is a way of saying that Negroponte almost certainly moved up the Intel and Microsoft participation by, what?, a couple of years. Now we have a robust market, with real choices, competitors with deep pockets, momentum, urgency; not philanthropy, but that beast called capitalism."

To be completely honest I'm not sure where I fall in the debate. While I understand Pier's point that "People in developing countries already have a low price portable computer - it just has a smaller screen and makes a ringing noise," however, there's a lot I like quite a bit about the $100 laptop. For one, they've managed to catalyze corporate interests to drop prices and think about a market they otherwise would have likely ignored. They also completely rethought the interface: "While traditional computer interfaces are modeled on the desktop metaphor, Sugar places the individual user at the center of the interface." (Idiocentricity?) And of course the computer is loaded with open source software and tools for building new stuff.

Anyway, I ordered mine (which means someone who really needs one will be getting theirs as well) and it even comes with a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot.

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COMMENTS

1Ryan Gonzales

I also donated about 20 of these computers as my "feel-good-move-of-the-year"... After looking at the functionality that these computers have, I would much rather see these in classrooms for k-8th grade or even high school in the USA... They are PERFECT for in-school education... as long as they are used properly, just like any technology.

December 19, 2007

2Arthur Soleimanpour

Negroponte should be applauded for recognizing that there is an opportunity to educate children in a relatively cheap way. The fact that companies are competing for market share here is really a blessing for us all. The more tools someone has at their disposal the more creative and innovative they can be and often times it’s the users environment that helps determine how those tools and mediums are implemented. For someone to say that we should deny people the same tools we have simply because their environment supports another tool is shortsighted and unfair. It’s funny that India was cited as an example in a couple of blog posts…the very same country that churns out programming armies. After all, I don’t think you can learn computer engineering (or the Adobe Suite for that matter) on a mobile phone and often times only the wealthy in developing countries have access to such education. While the OLPC computer is for little kids the very idea of getting them used to computers and providing cheap/subsidized tools to the poor will benefit us all one day.

Do you really have to ask me if I bought one?

December 19, 2007

3Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com

Originally, I didn't see the competition as a good thing. But I guess it has helped the cause in a way I didn't see coming. Now that it's almost the end of the year, I wonder what the numbers are? How many have bought the $100 laptop?

December 30, 2007