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Our Blogs The BeerFiles The madness of third world laptops | The madness of third world laptops |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Tuesday, 22 May 2007 | |
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So when Professor Negroponte cries out with self-righteous indignation that Intel is competing with the AMD powered OLPC notebook with its own cheap box, one must be a little skeptical. AMD will make money from the OLPC program, so why shouldn't the inventor of the microprocessor put forward its own competing program at lower prices? In a fit of pique, Professor Negroponte claims that Intel is deliberately selling its Classmate notebook at below cost and will raise prices later. Intel, like AMD, will charge what the market will bear. However, all of this is beside the point, which is that OLPC is a ridiculous ill-conceived idea. Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, most kids in the first world don't own their own notebook computers. Despite the fact that a cheap name brand notebook, can be had for a bit over US$500, most kids at school do work in computer labs and at home they either share a family computer or work on a hand-me-down desktop box. To do work, they log in through the web to an area on the school's network and they save work to their USB memory sticks. Back in the days before memory sticks, students at some private schools were required to have standard issue notebooks. Sometimes the students were mugged by street kids or drug addicts on their way home and had their notebooks stolen. In fact, notebooks are often stolen from cars, offices, homes and other places - they're good currency for thieves. Now imagine a scenario where some third world government has been suckered into buying 1 million OLPC notebooks - that's US$176 million! Assuming it has that kind of money to spare, the purchase enables the government to distribute these notebooks to say 10% of the nation's estimated 10 million kids in the 6 to 12 years age bracket. So 90% of the nation's kids miss out. |
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