Computing: The ambitious “$100 laptop” programme is having a few problems, but it may have catalysed a whole new marketIn November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Tunisia, Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled a small, cute, lime-green computer. The “$100 laptop” caused quite a stir among those interested in economic development. Dr Negroponte and his non-profit venture, One Laptop Per Child, hoped that the combination of clever design and the scale efficiencies of manufacturing would make it possible to make the laptops for $100 each. Governments in the developing world, he predicted, would order millions of the laptops and give them to schoolchildren, triggering a revolution in education.
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But in one respect the XO Laptop has undoubtedly made an impact: by helping to spawn a new market for low-cost laptops.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11482468
The rise of the low-cost laptop
In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Tunisia, Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled a small, cute, lime-green computer. The “$100 laptop” caused quite a stir among those interested in economic development. Dr Negroponte and his non-profit venture, One Laptop Per Child, hoped that the combination of clever design and the scale efficiencies of manufacturing would make it possible to make the laptops for $100 each. Governments in the developing world, he predicted, would order millions of the laptops and give them to schoolchildren, triggering a revolution in education. … But in one respect the XO Laptop has undoubtedly made an impact: by helping to spawn a new market for low-cost laptops.