On 2/20/13, Caryl Bigenho <[email protected]> wrote: > Also, if you think of anything else people are likely to ask that > isn't listed here, please include the question and, if you know it, the > answer.
Q. I thought this was (circa 2005) a "$100 laptop" whose price could "only go down over time due to Moore's Law." A. When it was complete, it first turned out to be a $188(?) laptop. And the MINIMAL configuration model unit price STILL (2013) is something like that. Why? To figure this out, I'd start by asking what do the components cost, and what does manufacturing. If component costs were not falling, I'd ask if OLPC was raising the hardware base over time, rather than staying with the equivalents of the original components, if still available. Does holding the sticker price help reduce TCO over time, or is this a matter of aiming at the price point where incipient demand is greatest (affordably better user experience)? Q. I thought this was a machine for the world's "poorest" children. According to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments, as of January 2011, at which point there were roughly 2 million XOs units, the biggest deployments, accounting for over 3 of 4 machines, were in Uruguay (420,000 + 100,000 + 40,000) = 560,000 and Peru (290,000 + 580,000 + 110,000) = 980,000 And per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product , the (non-PPP) numbers for these countries and the world in 2011 were: Uruguay--US$13,866 Peru---------US$5,904 World-------US$10,359 = ( US$69.11 trillion / US$79.39 trillion ) x US$11,900. So that the OLPC seems to be overwhelmingly (3/4+) for children whose nation has a nominal GDP per capita no less than 43% below the world average. While it is wonderful to try helping so-called middle-income countries, is this what OLPC had in mind all along? And if the price of the machine hasn't fallen in 8 years, what sort of help can the masses in poor countries expect, and when? Are machines like the Aakash aka Sakshat just pipe dreams? A. An important strength of the OLPC XO series is how rugged and compatible with hostile rural environments it is, and how easy it is to repair, something the new low-cost tablets don't begin to address. It is not impossible that simpler machines, e.g. those based on audio alone, could do a lot of good in helping the very poorest people in the world. The growing availability of cellphones, even in the poorest countries, is surely a potential platform for learning materials. With the advent of the new tablet, it is clear that OLPC seems to be raising, rather than lowering, the mean income level of its target market spread - new unit sales of tablets to homes in high-income nations, plus the traditional bulk sales of rugged laptops to school systems mainly in middle- (but also in some high- & low-) income nations. Q. Is the OLPC XO series still needed? Since it was on the drawing-board, the price of entry-level computers and appliances (e.g. ebook readers) has plummeted, with a whole world of netbooks come and gone, and an ever-increasing supply of tablets and smartphones. A. Again, the XO is a ruggedized machine - not a trivial consideration when dealing with K-6 students. It is easy and cheap to do basic repairs. And it is backed by a suite of free software based on Sugar and a community of developers. Two entire nations have made deep and expensive commitments to using the XO, and OLPC has a moral responsibility to see that they are not pushed off a cliff due to the evaporation of needed hardware. (At the same time, Sugar Labs has made Sugar available for free for installation on commodity PC gear.) Even today, a nation like Australia, which could afford to spend much more money on PCs, has elected to buy 55,000 XO units. Q. Will OLPC license key technologies to for-profit laptop makers? Have any for-profit firms expressed an interest in doing that? A. ??? Q. Are used XOs resold on eBay et alia? What price do they fetch these days? A. ??? Caryl, I assume you were a G1G1 person. If you ever go somewhere to do demos, I think it would be interesting if you could bring along BOTH an XO and a low-end laptop, showing how easy and quick it is to use SoaS on the latter in a non-conflicting way. This would also allow you to show how networking between the two machines works. With sufficient scripting, I think this would also make a great DailyMotion/YouTube/whatever video for Sugar Labs. Good luck! Ron _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
