There’s been a lot of interest the $100 XO laptop developed by non-profilt organization, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), which is hoping that governments of developing nations will buy the XO notebook and use it as part of their education programs.

OLPC: focus is on children in the developing word

Recently there have been reports that the XO notebook will be made available to the general public. As you can imagine many computer geeks liked the idea of a perfectly usable $100 notebook, which will be rugged, extremely energy efficient (it can be powered using a built-in wind-up generator), supports mesh wireless networking, and uses open source software. The laptops will have a 500 MHz, 128 MB of DRAM and 500 MB of Flash memory for long-term storage.

Sadly, OLPC has issued a statement that it has no plans to make the XO laptop available for sale to the general public, but has not completely ruled out this option in the future. 

“Contrary to recent reports, One Laptop per Child is not planning a consumer version of its current XO laptop, designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world,” said OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte. 

“XO will be made available to governments in very large quantities to be given to all children free, as part of the education system.”

The XO will be launched in Libya, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uruguay.  

“Many commercial ventures have been considered and proposed that may surface in 2008 or beyond, one of which is ‘buy 2 and get 1.’,” explained Negroponte. 

“In addition, OLPC is launching OLPC Foundation later this month, specifically to accommodate the huge goodwill and charity that has surfaced around the idea of a $100 laptop.”

There’s one point that seems to have been missed by many commentators.

The “$100″ price is a volume price, and does not include distributor or retailer markups (OLPC is selling directly to governments), and probably doesn’t include a much of a margin for OLPC, since it’s a non-profit organization.  If the XO was to be sold to the general public through the usual channels, you’d actually be looking at more like $300 to $500, rather than $100. Still a great price, but not nearly as enticing as the $100 price point.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 3:44 pm under Open source, Technology.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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