[geeks] Hey, it's cheaper than an iPhone...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
>Date: 2007/07/12 Thu AM 02:04:53 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Hey, it's cheaper than an iPhone...

>On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 05:35:36PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>> (Of course, Negroponte will be out crying that this isn't fair, his
>> OLPC "deserves" to be everywhere and "own the market" because, well,
>> he's a smart guy and he thought of it first... ;^)
>
>(rant follows)

Crud - you saw the smiley, right?

>Cut me a break. He was NOT the first to want to build cheap laptops, he was not
>the first to do it, he is not the only one trying. He is just the guy with the
>big name (MIT) and the big money behind him. 
>
>He and his laptop suffer from feature creep, and "I'm a rich white guy who will
>tell you froggy brown skined natives what you need" disease. (no offense
>meant to anyone, but once you've lived  outside the U.S. you understand what
>I mean.

OLPNWC - One Laptop Per Non-White Child?

>I litteraly could build a working laptop that would be accepted by people
>with less liberal views of what a computer should be used for, at a retail
>price of $100. If I could get companies to contribute parts and labor,
>or governments to sponsor them (they are trying that in India and China),
>I could produce them for around $10-$15. 

Asus Eee is $199/$299, dependent on FLASH RAM amount (4 or 8 Gig) and screen size (7" or 10") - I didn't mention the screen size difference earlier...

>Three years ago, I was showing a prototype handheld unit that played X86
>games which would retail for $150. The difference between it and a cheap
>laptop was the screen, case and a keyboard. The cost of a cheap case is
>a few dollars, OLED screens can be made NOW for pennies, and what does a
>cheap keyboard cost?
>
>Meanwhile the price of processors and memory have gone down. 
>
>BTW, unless you are Steve Balmer or Steve Jobs, almost any processor on
>the market will do, not necessiarily an X86. We needed it to play PC games,
>but there is enough FOSS software out there to do everything the average
>user wants that is processor independant.
>
>I may not be able to give them away to every child in the world,

He's not giving them away either, and his smallest order size is several hundred thousand units at $150 (est.) each piece.

Lionel