[geeks] Hey, it's cheaper than an iPhone...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 05:35:36PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> (Of course, Negroponte will be out crying that this isn't fair, his
> OLPC "deserves" to be everywhere and "own the market" because, well,
> he's a smart guy and he thought of it first... ;^)

(rant follows)

Cut me a break. He was NOT the first to want to build cheap laptops, he was not
the first to do it, he is not the only one trying. He is just the guy with the
big name (MIT) and the big money behind him. 

He and his laptop suffer from feature creep, and "I'm a rich white guy who will
tell you froggy brown skined natives what you need" disease. (no offense
meant to anyone, but once you've lived  outside the U.S. you understand what
I mean.

I litteraly could build a working laptop that would be accepted by people
with less liberal views of what a computer should be used for, at a retail
price of $100. If I could get companies to contribute parts and labor,
or governments to sponsor them (they are trying that in India and China),
I could produce them for around $10-$15. 

Three years ago, I was showing a prototype handheld unit that played X86
games which would retail for $150. The difference between it and a cheap
laptop was the screen, case and a keyboard. The cost of a cheap case is
a few dollars, OLED screens can be made NOW for pennies, and what does a
cheap keyboard cost?

Meanwhile the price of processors and memory have gone down. 

BTW, unless you are Steve Balmer or Steve Jobs, almost any processor on
the market will do, not necessiarily an X86. We needed it to play PC games,
but there is enough FOSS software out there to do everything the average
user wants that is processor independant.

I may not be able to give them away to every child in the world, but if I
make it appear that Israel has nothing to do with them, I could sell billions
of them to the Arab world, Africa, India and China, in places the OLPC
would never be allowed.

People need to understand that software and creativity is as important as hardware. 
Jobs was not interested (he had yet to embrace X86 processors) and a Korean company
stole our plans from a company we were negotiating with (which fell through due to
cultural issues), but were never ever to implement more than a small fraction of
what we could.  Too bad, so far, they've sold around 10k units, we would have
sold over 10 million. 

Yes, I may dream big, but I have the technical experience and and expertise
to do it. Now all I have to do is get my health back, and connect with a CEO
type to get the business going.

As another technical note, when we started in 2003 AMD was trying desperately to
push their ARM processor line and would have probably donated all of the ones
we needed for a production run of cheap laptops for charity.  We were not
interested and they offered us a good deal on an X86 processor.

We probably could have gotten Transmeta involved too. They had a nice chip at
a nice price, and we had considered a $200 version of the game unit with a
Transmeta chip in it and a red case. 

There is also the Red Dragon processor made in China. I have not heard much
about it recently, but it's cheap and patent royalty free.


Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/