Who will buy the "$100 laptop?"
Thu 22 Feb 07 04:45 | Tags: Hardware
Reuters ran a story earlier this month about the Children's Machine, formerly known as the $100 laptop, which I found by way of Fake Steve. This part of the article struck me:
[Tech analyst Wayan] Vota… predicts staggering costs for some poor nations. "If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73 percent of the entire Nigerian budget — that's not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria," he said.
By adults, for children, via bureaucracy. (image source)
I'm not sure where Vota is getting that number, seeing as how Wikipedia's article lists Nigeria as one of the "participating countries" in the project; surely someone in the Nigerian government ran a few numbers before they committed to this.
Nonetheless, it highlights the elephant in the room here; the problem with selling products to poor governments is self-evident. I really don't think that this project is going to end up being very successful, at least as it is currently envisioned, simply because when the time comes to put the money down, I think many of the governments are going to find that they have more pressing uses for the money than buying laptops for their students. A hundred bucks for a laptop for a kid doesn't sound like a lot of money to you or me, but to a poor, overpopulated country with several million school children, it's easy to see how the cost could be prohibitive.
That being said, I think that many of the innovations that the project has developed with regards to low power usage, "smart" displays, physical ruggedness, mesh networking and so on are pretty solid, and I can see many of these ideas being adopted in more traditional laptop models in the near future. So even if the project isn't successful in putting laptops in the hands of billions of children worldwide, I think it's hard to argue that it hasn't helped advance laptop technology quite a bit.
Perhaps if the whole selling-to-governments thing really doesn't work out, the organization behind all this will feel more inclined to release them to the free market sooner. I don't know if there's really a huge market for it, but I think they're cool in the way that they standardize hardware in a way that the industry hasn't seen for decades. That, among other reasons, may spur hobbyist interest in the devices.
Think of it this way; if you wanted to make a program for the Commodore 64, you had quite a few assurances. As a Commodore 64 was only a single model of computer, all 64s had the same amount of RAM, the same type and speed of processor, the same keyboard, the same operating system, the same ports and expansion slots, the same screen resolution. Perhaps there were a few differences, but they would pretty much all be in terms of third-party peripherals (like that amazing FastLoad cartridge), and therefore become somebody else's problem. You only had to write your program to one set of specifications, and if it ran on your 64, it would run on anyone's.
But fast forward to today. If you want to write a modern Mac program, you don't have anywhere near as many assurances. The user could be using a PowerPC-based Mac or an Intel-based Mac. It might be a single-processor, single-core iMac running at 500MHz, or a dual-processor, dual-core Mac Pro running at 3GHz. The user might be running OS X version 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, or 10.4; if they're running 10.4, they may be running 10.4.0, or 10.4.1, or so on. And if your program works with 10.4, is it assured that it will work with 10.5? They might have 256 megabytes of RAM or they might have 4 gigabytes. They may or may not have a CD writer, a DVD writer, a FireWire 800 port, USB 2.0 ports, 802.11 support, Bluetooth support… I think you get the idea. It becomes much harder to be sure that your program is going to run on every permutation of computer out there, especially if you try to do something too exotic.
But going back to the Children's Machine, it's like a Commodore 64 in that, at least to start with, there's only going to be one permutation of this system out there. (You could say that video game consoles are similar in that there's only one permutation of, say, an Xbox, but the difference is that Microsoft isn't giving out Xbox development kits free to anyone who wants one.) As an amateur programmer, that's very appealing to me, along with the fact that, like Commodore 64's BASIC, the Children's Machine will have support for interpreted language programming out of the box via Python and a few other languages. Maybe it's just me, but I find that quite interesting.
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#1 | Wayan Vota | 27 Feb 07 08:44
My Nigerian budget numbers came from the World Fact Book, OLPC, and press releases. The full calculations & commentary are here:
http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/nigeria/olpc_in_nigeria_budget.html
#2 | Albright | 27 Feb 07 17:59
Well, wait a minute. According to your link (and assuming the adjusted price of $208 is correct), the price would be 73% of Nigeria's yearly income. But your quote for the Reuters article states it would be 73% of Nigeria's yearly budget. There's a difference there…
I can see that, even if we went with the original price of $100, the cost would be prohibitive for Nigeria. But most of it would be a one-time cost, would it not? And even then, it's not something the government has to do all at once for the entire country.
I'm mostly in agreement with you here, but I have to play the devil's advocate.
73% of Nigeria's annual income would be even more consuming than 73% of the budget - that means there would be even less available to save, service debt, or apply to a budget.
Nicholas Negroponte has often stated that a country has to do OLPC all at once, no pilots allowed. I don't think that's reasonable or how it will happen, but its valuable to take him at his word just to show how off-the-charts he is.
And at $208, the amount calculated from OLPC's MOU with Libya, 73% of either the budget or the income is waaay off the charts.