BigShinyThing

This story actually broke last year but it’s too important to miss. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab has spun out a non-profit association called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that will be provided to governments at cost and issued to children by schools on the basis of one per child. The machines will be hardy, use open source Linux-based software and so energy-efficient that hand cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation. They will fold up into eBook mode for reading only. Mesh networking will give many machines internet access from one connection.

According to MIT, at least 50% of a modern laptop’s purchase price is taken up by the cost of sales, marketing, distribution and profit. OLPC has none of these costs. The machine will not be available in shops, although in order to discourage a grey market they will authorise production of a commercial version, where a share of profits will be dedicated to further lowering the cost of the OLPC machine. Distribution in most cases will instead piggyback on existing textbook channels.

The remaining 50% of the cost of a laptop can be divided into roughly two equal parts: the display and everything else. The display is the real technical challenge in terms of keeping costs down. The Media Lab at MIT has therefore developed short term ways to bring the cost of the display to close to $30 per machine. Longer term solutions may be innovations like E Ink (which MIT invented) that could eventually be as cheap as 10 cents per square inch for a full colour, sunlight-readable screen with better than textbook resolution in print mode. As for the ‘everything else’ (the processor, memory and power management): modern laptops use about 75% of their own processing capacity to support hefty software applications and the operating system itself. Hence the adoption of the ’skinny’ (and free) Linux operating system.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, has now officially introduced the $100 laptop in The Economist saying:

Will the $100 laptop happen? Yes. When? Late 2006. Where? Certainly in Brazil, Thailand and Egypt to begin with; we hope in China too. But the ‘market’ is global, more than 1 billion schoolchildren worldwide, for whom one laptop per child is the goal.