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Jul 25, 2007 12:00 AM
cc Cesar Cardoso
Despite earlier claims to the contrary, the folks at Nicholas Negroponte's (head of MIT's Media Lab) One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project are now saying that they might sell the originally-intended-only-for-the-developing-world laptop to gadget geeks in the west who really, really want to pay too much for what is ultimately a pretty under-powered computer.
The first OLPCs will roll off the assembly line sometime this October, and while prices have yet to be set (one rep for OLPC gave Reuters potential prices that are multiples of the projected initial $175 manufacturing cost of the laptop--$350 and $525) the idea is that profits from these sales will go toward getting more of these machines into the hands of needy kids the developing world over.
Steep though these prices may be given the specs of the OLPC (256MB RAM, 1 gig HD, 433 Mhz AMD Geode LX-700), anyone who has heard the of the unique features of this fabled laptop--a dual-mode screen visible in broad daylight, a ruggedized impact and moisture-proof case, built-in mesh networking, a motherboard that shuts off when not in use and the ability to power the thing (it only draws 0.1 watts when the backlight is off!) through a hand crank or a solar panel--might be interested despite the fact that machines with larger flash hard-drives and more ram are readily available for less money.
(In fact the Asus EeePC (you'd think they could have spent the extra $10 on a better name), a dark horse in the field of cheap laptops, comes in at somewhere around the impulse-buy range of $200 a machine.)
>> OLPC XO on Sale for Christmas Computer Buyers?! | OLPC News
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