OLPC moving towards the $200 laptop

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 18:23

Opinion and Analysis

It was a seemingly noble cause initiated by Nicholas Negroponte and colleagues at the MIT media lab - make a heap of cheap US$100 self-powered Linux laptops and sell them at practically cost to third world governments to distribute to children. Except so far things haven't exactly gone to plan, including the ballooning price.

The OLPC project, conceived and announced in 2005, had a goal of selling the XO laptops in minimum lots of 100,000 at $100 a piece to governments for distribution to children in the 6 to 12 age group. In the early stages of the project, Negroponte admitted that the initial price would more likely be closer to $135 but promised it would come down.

However, instead of going down, the initial price of the XO seems to be continually climbing - even as the price of commercial hardware continues to drop. In April, the new starting price for the XO was announced to be $176. Now, the price has risen to $188 and, with Internet access, support and training, will probably cost recipients well in excess of $200. With orders reportedly of 1.2 million units from Libya and 1 million units from Nigeria already on the books, at a $188 a piece that's quite a bit of cash earmarked to flow from supposedly cash poor third world nations into the coffers of OLPC.

Not surprisingly, critics of the scheme from some third world nations have questioned whether spending hundreds of millions on gadgets instead of infrastructure projects for clean water and agriculture is a prudent use of scarce funds available to poverty stricken countries.

Scandinavian-based aid organisation FAIR, which specializes in implementing recycled computers for use in third world school computer laboratories, has accused OLPC of exploiting poor countries and misleading them into taking a high investment risk for a new type of technology, the success of which is very uncertain. FAIR believes the use of recycled computers and school computer labs is a greener and more cost effective way of addressing the technology education of poorer nations.

The government of India, a country which would appear to be a prime candidate for the OLPC program, has rejected the XO laptop claiming that the country can produce its own laptop for a fraction of the cost. However, there has been little evidence that anything concrete has emerged as yet.

Meanwhile, the steadily increasing cost of the XO laptop has put it into the same price bracket as competing commercial products from Intel and Asus.

For the governments of third world countries, however, the question remains as to whether they can afford the luxury of spending hundreds of millions on entry level technology for primary school children when many are still striving to achieve sustainable access to food and clean water.