{"id":37,"date":"2005-04-09T07:58:12","date_gmt":"2005-04-09T12:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2005\/04\/09\/mit-media-labs-100-laptop-challenge\/"},"modified":"2005-04-09T07:58:12","modified_gmt":"2005-04-09T12:58:12","slug":"mit-media-labs-100-laptop-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2005\/04\/09\/mit-media-labs-100-laptop-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"MIT Media Lab&#8217;s $100 Laptop challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a503'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n Seems that MIT is trying to make a Laptop for the poor for $100.  More<br \/>\n info <a href=\"http:\/\/laptop.media.mit.edu\/\">here<\/a>.  Call me a skeptic<br \/>\n however after reading news about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simputer.org\/\"><br \/>\n Simputer<\/a> not winning the hearts<br \/>\n (and more importantly the wallets) of India&#8217;s poorer population I&#8217;m<br \/>\n not sure offering a bumped down machine will be a viable solution unless<br \/>\n it can withstand the current heavy economic competition to reduce<br \/>\n computer prices.  Here&#8217;s a choice quote from iWon News regarding<br \/>\n the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simputer.org\/\">Simputer<\/a>:\n <\/p>\n<p>\n <em><br \/>\n Picopeta has sold fewer than 2,000 units in the past 12 months, far below the target of 50,000. Worse, only 10 percent of those Simputers were bought for rural use.<br \/>\n <\/em>\n <\/p>\n<p>\n Here are some issues that I think will need to be dealt with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Do the poor even have $100?  There needs to be some way for them to<br \/>\n     save up for it.<\/li>\n<li> When you&#8217;re worrying about starving, does worrying about the Digital Gap<br \/>\n     really matter?<\/li>\n<li> Building a special design machine has continuously lost to commodity<br \/>\n     general purpose computers in almost any story I&#8217;ve ever read.  Unless the<br \/>\n     folks at MIT can inspire MANY manufacturers to take on this challenge then<br \/>\n     Dell probably has an answer.<\/li>\n<li> Following on the above point, you need to sell millions and millions to<br \/>\n      make the manufacturing\/processing costs cheap over time<\/li>\n<li> If you knew enough about computers and had a choice between getting a &#8216;real&#8217;<br \/>\n     machine and this &#8216;subsidized&#8217; machine.  Which would you choose?<\/li>\n<li> There&#8217;s piles of old machines being tossed out by richer countries that<br \/>\n      already come close to the specs needed.  How about arrange for a way<br \/>\n      for these machines to go to poorer countries.  Might be good for them to<br \/>\n      learn how to fix them.  (Okay that sounds like dumping a problem off to<br \/>\n      a bunch of poorer people, but frankly what happens to most of this stuff<br \/>\n      that gets tossed?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/apnews1.iwon.com\/\/article\/20050403\/D89864N80.html\">The iWon Simputer article<\/a><br \/>\n <br \/>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/hardware.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=05\/04\/04\/0058236&amp;tid=100&amp;tid=218\">Slashdot&#8217;s story<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seems that MIT is trying to make a Laptop for the poor for $100. More info here. Call me a skeptic however after reading news about the Simputer not winning the hearts (and more importantly the wallets) of India&#8217;s poorer population I&#8217;m not sure offering a bumped down machine will be a viable solution unless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}