The $100 Dream

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, first touted the idea of a $100 laptop computer at the January 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, thus launching the nonprofit initiative One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Now, three years later, children around the world are clicking away on the vibrantly colored machines, now called the XO laptop, but at a price of $188—closer to double the original goal. And that doesn't include shipping and handling.

The number of sales may also be keeping the price up. Just 450,000 units have sold so far, including contracts with Peru and Nigeria for 250,000 inked in late November, according to OLPC spokesperson Jackie Lustig. But according to David Cavallo, OLPC's chief learning architect, quite a few countries have signed on to the project. But these agreements are not being made public at this time, he wrote in an email.

OLPC has not given up on the $100 dream and believes that as demand for the gadget grows, the price will fall, presumably as more machines are built at a lower cost. “We hope to reach $100 in the next two years,” wrote Cavallo. “We are dedicated to driving the price down.”

In an effort to boost interest and demand, OLPC launched the Give One, Get One offer on Nov. 12, 2007. For $399, about $425 with shipping, buyers in the U.S. and Canada received one XO laptop for themselves, with another unit being donated to a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. For their donation, purchasers also received a $200 tax deduction. As of late November, OLPC had raised $22 million, says Lustig, selling a little over 100,000 machines to individuals primarily. OLPC had extended the intially two-week offer until Dec. 31, most likely to catch the holiday rush and end-of-year tax write-offs. Orders received after mid-November were expected to be fulfilled sometime after Christmas and into early 2008, according to a schedule appearing on OLPC's site.

Running on Linux, the XO allows users to fiddle with the open-source software. But out of the box, the device keeps things simple, with an eye toward kid appeal. Young children, even preschoolers, can select a class memory game, a drawing program, and the tic-tac-toe-like Connect. Meanwhile, older kids can take advantage of the Google search interface, music composition software, a programming tutorial, and, of course, a basic word processing program.

Working directly with children in several countries as they've received their XOs, Cavallo has witnessed the transformative power of these machines. “When children who have been marginalized receive their own laptops it is such a strong statement of inclusion and value that their sense of identity truly changes,” he writes. “In one school in São Paulo, with early prototype machines, we had a problem with the recharging of a battery so I tried to switch one girl's machine and she got quite upset and told me, as she clutched her laptop to her chest, that the other one was hers and to fix it.”

Even priced at $188, not a small amount of money for any educational institution, schools in the U. S. could find the XO a great learning tool, and OLPC says that several states have approached the nonprofit to try and supply the laptop to children in this country, which the group hopes to do “in the long run,” according to its Web site.

It's a nice idea. From Mongolia to Manhattan, São Paulo to San Francisco, XOs running, students chatting, collaborating on activities—one laptop per child.