One embarrassment per laptop per child arrives

WILL THE "One Laptop Per Child" scheme, be held accountable? Sadly, probably not.

I wrote a column about this time last year on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort. The organisation said it would have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007 and it would come in at a cost of around $100 bucks.

In a follow-up piece a few weeks later, I wrote "Negroponte says that the price per laptop won't be $100, but has drifted upward to around $115. And this is before the never-before-mass-produced dual-mode LCD display has been finalised, much less cranked up any quantities in prototype form. Don't be surprised if first run units end up arriving not in late 2006, but sometime in 2007 and costing closer to $135 to $150 once the smoke clears."

As 2006 has come and nearly gone, the estimated price for a laptop slowly climbed up to around $150 per unit, but it turns out even that figure is off base.

According to numbers posted by OLPCnews.com, here, Libya is going to pay around $208 per laptop - the number is calculated out of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to purchase 1.2 million computers, a server per school, a team of technical advisors to set up the system, satellite internet service and other infrastructure for $250 million. You'd expect servers, satellite internet, and "other infrastructure" to add a couple of bucks per unit, but doubling it? Libya's school children won't see the laptops until mid-2007 at the earliest.

What's the current hardware status of OLPC? The first ten (10) hand-built units arrived in Cambridge, Mass, USA, home of OLPC, last week plus maybe another 800 systems have been run off an assembly line for seeding into the developer community, "interested parties" and "countries." The systems are described as "very close" to the final build of the hardware, but OLPC hasn't specified what temperatures and humidity the laptop is expected to operate in, only "somewhere in between typical laptop requirements and Mil spec; exact values have not been settled " Since the laptop is going to operate in some of the most hot and humid places on the planet (South America, Libya), not having nailed down operational specs for heat and humidity is pretty significant.

What is $150-200 per laptop going to get you? Not much. It has a target weight of less than 1.5 kilograms. Under the hood, you're going to find an AMD Geode GX-500 clocking at 366 MHz, supported by an AMD CS5536 South Bridge chipset and a whole 128 MB of RAM running at 133 MHz. There's a meg of ROM to hold the BIOS, 512 MB of flash RAM for "mass storage," around 70 keys on the keyboard, a touch pad, dual internal speakers, an internal microphone, a 802.11 b/g chip for Wi-Fi with dual adjustable antennas, a cheap video camera supporting 640 by 480 resolution at 30 frames per second. You'll also find standard ports for Mic in, line out, three USB 2.0 connectors, an SD card slot and a NiMH battery pack.

Perhaps the most "advanced" feature is the 7.5-inch dual-mode TFT display that has a high-res monochrome mode and a color display. Resolution is supposed to be 1200 by 900 (200 dpi). There's a special chip and some apparently complex mumbo-jumbo to keep the display alive while the processor is suspended. How much the display costs relative to the rest of the box isn't separated out, but I'd be willing to bet it is a third to almost half of the unit price per laptop.

One thing that got lost in the design shuffle is an on-board crank built into the handle for generating power, a feature that was hyped in the initial presentations. Turns out that "human power stresses components" and a crank got lost in the move to production. So now, instead of a stand-alone laptop that can be powered by the child without any supporting infrastructure in a unit that was supposed to cost $100, you've now got a $150-200 unit with a unique LCD display that's going to require the purchase of supporting power generation infrastructure.

Software is another story and described as "alpha quality" with major bugs and missing features. Given that developers are just getting rough-draft units, we're talking at least another three months for operating system stability, with applications being anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, here in the States, Wal-Mart is selling a Compaq laptop for $398 that includes a 15.4-inch screen, a 3300+ AMD Sempron processor at 2.0GHz, a 60GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, and 512MB of memory. Of course, the Compaq is a power hog relative to the OLPC, but WalMart is also making a profit on the units. The boxes would likely also be anywhere from $50-75 cheaper if they weren't loaded with Windows XP.

Is it fair to compare a $398 off-the-shelf laptop to a $208 OLPC? Most will argue that it's an apples and oranges comparison, but would it really take that much for Dell or HP to quickly and quietly produce a laptop that could beat the OLPC hand-down? µ

See Also
Cheap AMD machines for Brazil not cheap at all
Negreponte says Intel spurned cheap laptop
Quanta to ship $100 notebooks by year end
MIT suffers hubris over $100 notebook