RSSIndian Engineers Aiming for $10 Laptop
By Ed Oswald | Published May 4, 2007, 3:47 PM
Engineers in India are looking into ways to create a laptop that would cost a mere $10. The effort came in response to the increasing price of the so-called '$100 laptop.'
The Indian government has taken a pass on the device, opting instead for two homegrown designs. One is from a student in one of the country's technology schools, while the other was produced by the Institute of Science, a graduate school in Bangalore.
Neither device has been able to get the price down to that $10 threshold, but has gotten as close as $47. The government so far has not gotten any company to agree to produce the device, as building it for only $10 would likely mean the manufacturer would have to take a significant loss.
Many of the parts that would be needed must be produced elsewhere, which incurs additional costs, those close to the project said. To save money, some parts may be produced within the country rather than elsewhere.
Any actual device is likely still at least two years away from becoming a reality. A meeting has been scheduled for later in May to discuss the project. On the other hand, the OLPC project will start shipping actual laptops later this year.
What? So you think these folks don't have places to go and things to do? ;-)
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|Sounds like a naff idea to get funding if you ask me, aiming for a laptop is just laughable.
They could build a $10 computer. This would consist of all the surplus usually dumped into landfill, shipped over to india and then assembled into something that could run an OS reasonable cheap.
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|See what can be done when you pay employees below standard wages. I bet Taiwan can get it down to $7.50 ($7.25 for parts/.25 cents for labor).
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|$10 laptop? Who are they kidding? This would've made a great joke story on April 1st.
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|It's called a Dell
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|BWAHAHAHAHA
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|Yup, its called the abacus.
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|There's some hefty profit in $10 for an abacus.
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|Yeah, a bit, but the titanium means that it is resilient and lightweight!
That's an important consideration when you are riding a cantankerous water buffalo.
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|hey at least someone is trying to find and build inexpensive laptops, instead of making fun lets hope for success. I am all for the $100 laptops, trust me you see in Nigeria or other 3rd world countries people are so uninformed and the GANGS rule.
People with nothing better to do will get in trouble, at lest with this even if its surfing the web they will be informed and staying out of trouble.
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|This is incredible in both fun and plain "incredibleness" hehe!
Jokes aside, we definitely need to see the specifications of this laptop.
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|They upgraded the LCD to an LED.
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|160x120 resolution. 4 shades of gray.
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|I was curious because I remembered that laptops used to cost $6000+, so I looked in wikipedia I found this, under "calculator"
"In 1954, IBM, in the U.S.A., demonstrated a large all-transistor calculator and, in 1957, the company released the first commercial all-transistor calculator, the IBM 608, though it was housed in several cabinets and cost about $80,000."
Now calculators cost $1.00. $20 for a decent childrens calculator. you can get speak and spell for $30. That's with 30% profit. After all they are talking about laptops for children.
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|Does anyone know if they decided to go for the 1" display or the 1.5" wide screen display? :-)
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|I'm not even going to start unleashing all my Indian convenience store clerk jokes on this one. I have to uphold the highest moral values here of course. :)
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|what a bunch of crap.
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|Indian scams, marketing hype and so on keep going. Just like when multinational switch to India for their support lines... with Indian people barely speaking english or any other language but claimed to be geniuses and such.. It's all a giant worldwide scam, Indians just like Chinese people are slaves of their regimes and some multinationals managers as well as politicians signed agreements to earn bucks from these scams.
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|Please do not go around talking through your a** ... If you do not know whats going on in India or China, shut the mouth and keep your eyes and ears wide open!
Better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are dumb rather than opening it and removing all doubts!
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|Hooo, u better mind ur words 'aredo'. Let talk abt technology n related things.
BTW which country r u from? I suppose u never gone to school, coz it seems u havent read any History books of ur country or u r life grounded.
n ya stop comparing Indians n Chinese.
For others lets have a +ve approach , thinking atleast we Indians have reached the $47 mark, isnt tat a point??
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|Agreed to a certain degree. I agree not all indian speak english just like not all Japanese or Chinese speak it. I have been on support calls that were routed to India or Philipines and it was painful. I blame the US COMPANIES that do that, I stopped buying products from them.
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|WTH?
AOL as a second language?
lmao...
Hard to take anyone seriously who types like that. It was definitely entertaining though.
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|Pencil 2.0 + Paper 4.5 = $10 laptop
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|$2 + $4.5 is not = $10 :)
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|I thought he meant version numbers. Perhaps I was being too generous?
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|It will be nice if they can pull it off but its not going to be 10 USD...no WAY! LCD/Battery alone will push the cost above 10. Also people the FEDERAL RESERVE BANK in USA is a private BANK which prints money out of nothing & lends it to the Goverment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsZO6G7dfpI
Wake up! The only superpower & the west is controlled by a small group of private banking families not there goverments.
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|$10 is possible. It's hard to make plastic the size of a laptop for under $10. None the less with a monitor, storage, memory, CPU, etc. Even with extremely, extremely low-end parts.
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|Is this a joke!?!?
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|Can you say "Packard Bell"
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|haha, yea they are long gone but trust me they were good computers when they came out. I use to fix them and I saw very few PB @ ComputerCity. Most were Compaq minis
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|One wonders where they are going to have to outsource the manufacture to in order to meet that goal.
And for all of you who think that this is a first, almost 1/2 of all the IT work sourced to India is outsourced once again to China.
Its nice to read such cute and enlightened, but uninformed, comments.
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|Stroke that ego, buddy.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep from crying yourself to sleep every night.... :p
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|If they make a new monitor which cost $ 10, they can sell millions.
especially if it is good.
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|made of paper, wood and paper clips. Even then you might need your staples discount card.
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|I think the molded plastic would cost more then $10.00.
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|You can have my old Pentium MMX for $10.
It comes with free dust.
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|I hope they manage this. Computers are fairly useful aids to education, especially in a world society whose dependence on computing keeps rising, that affordable computers for even the poorest families is, in my opinion, a good idea.
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|A $50 laptop I can see...but $10 is impossible unless you're going with a 133mhz processor and 32-64 megs ram :D
It would have to be made at a loss, but I can see me joining in on this project, considering it's taking the OLPC team forever...at least they're getting it right the first time.
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|133mhz + 32-64meg ram is quite a bit you know..
running some light linux + simple word processor is quite different from having nothing
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|OS will be unsold copies of Vista
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|bravo, bravo!! :))
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|Isn't that called a Mac?
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|For the first time in history, India is going to outsource work. What a weird turn of events...
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|Man...is this keyboard giving you splinters?
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|We had it here yeeears ago, it was called:
"Lite-Bright"
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|What does it use for a screen? Paper?
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|The funny part would be if they had to outsource it to some other country because labor costs pushed it over the $10 mark. :)
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|Yeah no kidding. Now they will see how it is.
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|keep the cost down.. use china's slave kids
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|You forgot blind.
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|Speaking of outsourcing, who do you suppose will be on the other end of the phone when you call tech support from India to get help for a computer made in India ??
Sparky the wonder dog ?
Arf !
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|Why not just George Bush ... Isn't he the guy who could subdue any opposition ... or maybe be Bill Clinton cause he could make a few comply :P
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