I agree with the others... ditch the battery/power system and put the hand crank on back on it. At least then they'd have no black market value, because none of us are gonna want to crank the damn thing to surf the web.

Voltron's Underwear

I find it hard to believe that they can't manage to make a laptop for under $100. I have a feeling that this whole project has become a committee camel. To me, the hardware seems almost inconsequential here, it's the software that's the tricky part. For the hardware, you need little more than a yesterdays-tech pda with wifi and a hand-crank.

My guess of the final price? $270, or just slightly more than what is sure to be a more functional and usable Asus eee PC

JomeyQ

And how many people are throwing away 18 month-old laptops that can do more than these things?

slyseekr

@MaxRC:
E-X-A-C-T-O-M-U-N-D-O !
I just saw them in the BestBuy add last Sunday.

I like your idea of ebaying all the old hardware...

Any country thinking of buying a OLPC should setup an office in NY,LA, etc... ebay the crap out of it, consolidate all the laptops in one shipment along with some used generators for power, and call it the day.

They would have laptops up the wazoo in no time.

aec007

@l3igh3d: That is sadly hilarious!

bez_online

EEE PC at $400 doesn't seem so bad now, does it?

:(

fuzzycuffs

I wonder if the drop in the value of the dollar has anything to do with it. I imagine plenty of foreign components go into the product originating from countries that have currencies that are appreciating against the dollar... just a thought.

nakmario

project failure: confirmed.

firesign

In other news, US retailers sell 14.1" and 15.4" Gateway and Toshiba notebooks with Celeron M processor, 80GB HD, CDRW/DVD, WiFi, and full windows license for $299/$350.

Ditch this project, not because it isn't noble, not because the artificial price point is laughable, and not even because the private enterprise of Asus has beaten it to market with a more appealing product. Ditch it because the OLPC "laptop" suffers lack of compatibility that greatly depreciates whatever educational benefit that having a computer brings to a child in the first place.

My child likes his $350 Gateway 14.1" notebook just fine.

MaxRC

Next will be $0 once everyone figures out this is vaporware and the market and company go away.

pagercam

I'd have to agree, I liked it much better when they had the crank attached to recharge it.

I can see it now.....one kid cranking away to charge it up, as one kid is cranking him self away as they discover the world of internet porn.

l3igh3d

Ummm...on the Dell website, without any discounts, you can get a notebook computer for $499. Find a good coupon code, combine it with a good-discount day, and you can probably get a "real" laptop for the price of this thing.

I just checked ebay too. Lots of laptops for sale for much cheaper than this OLPC. Here's an idea:

instead of wasting money designing the OLPC, and producing it (wasting energy, producing more waste, etc), why don't they just buy every third-world kid a few-years-old laptop from eBay? It'll be cheaper, good for the environment (reusing old instead of making new), probably give them a more powerful machine, and be all-around much less embarrassing.

Man...you could probably buy a $100 ebay computer and combine it with a hand-crank (or whatever this thing gets power from) for about $150...and it'd be done today and better than the OLPC.

EQC

ditch the project, buy a asus eeepc instead. i liked this thing better when they had the charging lever installed. (early concepts)

swartz

can they eat the laptops? They are probably hungry

PirateSasquatch

Do I hear "$300"?

ideaman2020

cool I'll get one when I find some third world kid selling it on ebay for 50 bucks.
(funny i'm from a third world myself)

TheJunkMonger

I guess they need to drop some features.

nutbastard

Heeey that's like three times as much!!

strider_mt2k

My guess is that I don't give a shit anymore. It's been in production for what, 8 years? It's vaporware. And now at $200 and above, it's going to flop.

bdkennedy1

Why in the hell does a 7.5" screen need a 1200x900 resolution? If we survived nearly a decade with a 12.1" screen at 800x600 so can frigging kids. On top of that, why don't they just use LED backlighting? If they just make it an 8" screen at 800x600 resolution with LED backlighting, use a 45nm chipset for the AMD Geode processor, and two USB 2.0 connectors rather than three, they can bring this price down to around 100 dollars again.

daftrok

Great. I can get a better one for this price on black friday.

o0adam0o

Team up with Microsoft, put a stripped down version of Windows on it, and sell it as a kids PC in the US.

Use the profits to subsidize your PC for the 3rd world program.

RevMcCoy

Quite honestly, it is easy to sell a PC for under $200 if there is no warranty. What happens when these devices fail, has the company put aside earnings to repair them and ship back to user?

I don't think so.

kibets

Swivel screen: Important for classrooms, especially if the screen is low quality, so that the 10 kids clustered around can take turns actually looking at what's on the screen. I think a swivel costs like 10 cents.

bandit

@nutbastard: Agreed. Prime example: why the hell does it have a swivel screen???

witeowl

Remember when Nicholas said "$100 Laptop by 2008" and we were like "No way!" and Nicholas was all "We thought we could do it for $100 but it's gonna be more like $188."

That was great.

dingus

This whole thing is a joke. It's rich dumbasses peering down at the world from their high horses and prescribing solutions for what ails. Total arrogance.

My favorite part was when the kids who got these things immediately started looking up porn with them. If anyone thinks "having computers" is going to turn anything around in the developing world they're an idiot. The real problems are sooooo much deeper and more complex than that and half-solutions (less-than-half in this case) actually do more harm than good because they act as a resource sink.

Pathetic.

oldmanstan

Meanwhile Microsoft and Intel have done everything they can to undermine this project - including buying off the news media to ridicule it. But it's inevitable. The Third World is going to leapfrog the First and go straight to a distributed wireless information economy - and we won't be able to compete with it.

NeoPolticus

Those "kids" will have your job in ten years "old man" - while you'll be playing Halo 5 on Vista III - which will be the only thing a Microsoft-based computer will be good for by then.

The future is India, China, and Africa.

NeoPolticus

Many of your objections are addressed in the FAQ.

the hand crank stressed the plastic too much (they're looking at a separate charging pulley)

a motley collection of second-hand computers is much harder to deploy than a single hardware platform

the high-res display is readable in bright sunlight and then doesn't require the energy-sapping backlight

if you don't understand the many hardware differences between the XO and the Eee PC then you aren't paying attention

how exactly does no Windows compatibility depreciate a learning tool?

It's a shame it's running into problems. I still look forward to give 1 get 1, and how many of you armchair urinaters have actually donated $200 to, say, [www.care.org] to better life for kids in developing countries?

skierpage

@skierpage: I'm not really all that in favor of this boondoggle, mainly because I disagree with the central premise that computers will cure all ills.

Unfortunately, the project's response to the question about recycling is "We'll worry about that bridge when we cross it". Given that the computer is aimed at third-world nations who (a) do not have a robust infrastructure to recycle electronics safely and (b) often serve as a repository for dumping of electronics from Europe and the Americas, the recycling/disposal problem needs to be addressed at inception.

Additionally, there are more immediate needs in third-world countries, such as safe drinking water, stable government, basic human rights, and access to health care. Computing is a post-material need. The material needs should be addressed first.

omg-ponies