A $100 Laptop May Soon Be a Reality

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In Africa, Asia, and South America, residents often lack access to basic necessities such as electricity and medical care, much less the technological resources to educate their children. And though deploying millions of inexpensive computers throughout the developing world might seem like a pipe dream, a nonprofit organization called One Laptop per Child ( OLPC), is coming close to making this ambitious goal a reality.

A project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, OLPC has developed a laptop computer with a target price of just $100 (though that price point hasn't been finalized as of this article). Designed specifically for children in developing nations, the pint-sized laptop will ship with a Linux operating system, a 500MHz processor, 128MB of DRAM, 512MB of Flash memory (but no hard drive), four USB ports, a Wi-Fi chip, and a dual-mode display that can be viewed in either color or black-and-white. Quanta will manufacturer the machines and OLPC plans to distribute the laptops by selling them in large quantities to governments in developing nations.

As many developing nations lack a consistent, regular supply of electricity, the laptop will feature some sort of human-powered mechanism that could take the form of a crank or lever so students and teachers can manually generate power. And to help address the absence of a telecommunications infrastructure in many parts of the globe, the laptops have been designed to create a peer-to-peer network with one another, enabling each classroom to have its own local network.

The $100 laptop will offer some sort of human-powered mechanism, such as a crank or lever, to manually generate power.

Helping OLPC solve networking issues in the developing world falls on Michail Bletsas, an electrical and computer engineer by trade, and now the organization's Chief Connectivity Officer. Though Bletsas is primarily concerned with advising developing nations as to how best create a network infrastructure, he has keen insights into just about every aspect of the project.

Recently, TechSoup sat down with Bletsas to find out more about the $100 laptop, including where the project currently stands, how environmentally friendly the computers are, and whether nonprofit organizations will eventually be able to get their hands on these machines.

TechSoup: Can you talk a bit about technological breakthrough at MIT that made the $100 laptop possible?

Michail Bletsas: There were a variety of breakthroughs, but the most important one, if you look at the bill of the materials, is the ability to make a display for $40. And what we have done there is taken advantage of developments in the area of light-emitting diodes, which allowed us to make one of the two most expensive components of the display at a much lower price point, and that's the backlight. And the other development was that we were able to remove some color filters. So those were the two main ideas that made the display possible.

TS: Can you talk about where the project currently stands? When will we see actual units begin to ship in bulk and which countries will they be going to first?

MB: The plan is still to ship units in large quantities by the end of the first quarter of 2007 -- that hasn't changed in quite a long time. As of now the countries we are going to ship the laptop to will probably be Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Egypt. The other two big countries we would like to launch at -- India and China -- are not as clear yet.

TS: Aesthetically speaking, the prototype doesn't look much like a conventional laptop. Is this design meant to make the computer more kid-friendly or is it born out of economic necessity?

MB: The industrial design is definitely driven by how to make it better for kids. There is not that much difference in the price of materials (as opposed to conventional laptops). I don't think you can make any savings on the industrial design; we employ a very high-end industrial design, but that's not where we're going to save. We're going to save, as I told you, on the display.

TS: Can you talk a little a bit about how the laptop can be manually powered with a crank?

MB: We definitely have to be concerned with human power because the laptop is going to be deployed in places where there's not going to be any electricity. There's a statistic out there that about 50 percent of the world's kids don't have reliable electricity at home. So doing a laptop the way we do laptops in the developed world is not going to help them.

We are designing the laptops so, at this point in time, they have an average operating consumption of about three watts. And at that power level, it starts to become practical to have human power. If you really want to have human power, you have to lower the power consumption below one watt. In e-book mode, our laptop is barely at one watt right now. So we are getting there. We're not quite there but we are getting there, and we certainly have operating modes where human power is practical.

What we ended up having to do is remove the crank from the laptop and move it off-board for purely ergonomic reasons. There is no way to apply the necessary torque having the crank on the laptop. We've actually made some pretty good progress there. We are working with two companies to provide human-power solutions. We want the human-power generator to be independent from the laptop because we want (people) to be able to use the laptop in the same way they use cell phones or other small appliances or anything that requires them to charge a battery.

TS: The estimates we read said that one minute of cranking would produce about 10 minutes of use.

MB: That's in e-book mode. You can comfortably create 10 watts using both hands. And if the laptop consumes one watt, you are right there: a 1-to-10 ratio.

TS: Tell us about OLPC's decision to use flash memory rather than an actual hard drive?

MB: Three reasons: cost, power consumption, and reliability.

TS: Are there plans to allow individual users or local technicians to upgrade the hardware themselves?

MB: There are plenty of discussions there. Obviously for cost reasons, it's very hard to put in extra circuits for memory. I think that the first peripherals that people are going to buy for the laptop are going to be external USB devices, whether those are USB Flash keys or small hard disks.

We are toying with the idea of putting in an SD flash memory [card] slot so that people can add more storage capacity without having something funny hanging off their USB port. There is probably going to be an option to order the laptop with double the RAM. It's up to the government buying the laptops, but doubling the memory right now would cost a little over $5 (per laptop).

TS: According to an article that ran in the Wall Street Journal, OLPC turned down Apple's offer of free copies of Mac OS X. Care to explain why?

MB: First, we think that it's important to be able to tinker with the operating system, and OS X is hard to tinker with.

The second reason is that it's a memory footprint issue, and there's no way to take down OS X so that it runs at 128MB of memory. Now if it were the old NeXTSTEP, we could do it, so technically it's doable. If people want to port a version of OS X to run on the laptop — and I think that it will happen if we ship it in large quantities — they are free to do it; the platform is open.

We definitely appreciated it (Apple's offer) very much; it's not like we wanted to snub anybody or that we don't think OS X is a great operating system. It's just that we made shipping an open-source operating system a fundamental pillar of our strategy.

TS: Will the software that comes bundled with the initial round of $100 laptops — such as educational and Web-browsing programs — all be open source or will some of it be from commercial vendors?

MB: There is going to be some commercial stuff; we are not going to make it a requirement that it only runs open-source software. But we try to concentrate on open-source stuff for a variety of reasons. I mean, cost is not the most important; again, creativity, and the ability to tinker are the most important. And we think that by encouraging open-source software, we encourage the creation of better content for the laptop because we can get more people engaged.

On the other hand, obviously there are certain applications that are closed-source or proprietary that we would love to have running on the laptop, and we encourage other companies to develop for it. I think it's a good idea to have the laptop go out with as little memory as possible because a lot of the complexity that comes with today's software is a side effect of sloppy development practices.

TS: Can you cite an example of a commercial application that might be reworked to run on the laptop.

MB: I don't want to comment on that because it is not my area, but I can tell you that I'm personally working with Skype, for example, to have a laptop-specific version.

TS: In many countries where OLPC plans to deploy laptops, wireless Internet coverage may be spotty or nonexistent. What are your thoughts on dealing with this issue?

MB: Obviously the countries will have to deal with that. But what we are doing with the laptops is making sure that when you deploy them in a school or in a community -- even if there is no network connectivity — the laptops form a network. Now, if one of the kids gets some kind of (Internet) connectivity, it becomes easier for the rest of the kids pick up connectivity, because the laptops are already forming a network.

I think that the good thing about selling them (the laptops) to governments is if the government makes such a massive investment to buy a million units, they would be willing to spend a little bit more money — a few more million dollars — to make sure that there is some kind of connectivity. In a lot of places in the developing world, unless you are going to work with the government, there is no way that you are going to jump-start connectivity because of monopoly reasons and all sorts of competitive anomalies.

One of my main responsibilities is to give governments options for setting up an (network) infrastructure as quickly and inexpensively as possible. And that's why I'm in this position, because I have done it, personally, before. That's how I got involved with this project.

TS: What's the estimated lifespan of one of these laptops, and are there any issues that make them different from conventional laptops in terms of recycling?

MB: Well, it's a lot smaller (than standard laptops); there's a lot less material. It conforms to the latest European Union environmental and recycling standards. It uses nickel-metal hydride batteries, which don't have to be specially disposed of. I think we are doing much better than normal laptops when it comes to recycling.

We designed the laptops to last for about five years, and that has to do with the cycles in the battery. And that's not that much different from laptops here, believe it or not.

TS: In a recent article called Changes in the antivirus industry security, expert Eugene Kaspersky said programs that seek to distribute cheap laptops to developing countries encourage criminal activity on the Internet. How would you respond to this?

MB: I'm not going to put any other organization down, but you know what? People get killed on the roads every day, and nobody's advocating that we stop using cars. I think that being afraid that this is going to lead to more (cybercrime) is totally unrealistic. You want the kids to learn how to use (laptops) for the useful things that they are going to do with them.

Like every other technology out there, it has good and bad uses, and in the case of computers, I think that society agrees universally that the good uses outweigh the bad ones. So advocating that we shouldn't give the technology to the less developed countries is like saying, "We want to make sure that there will never be anything bad, so keep them poor and keep them uneducated."

TS: The laptop is designed for children in developing countries, but are there plans to eventually make it more widely available, specifically to nonprofit organizations on a budget?

MB: We are thinking about how to make it more widely available, but hopefully someone else would do that for us. Given the response we've heard from the computer industry, we think that this will happen. We are discussing tons of ways to actually make it more widely available, but everything is very premature and it will stay there up until we have done the first deployment of the laptop.

Right now we are trying to get the laptop out on time and making it as compelling as possible. After that is done, then we'll concentrate more on how we'll move on thereafter. Because if we put that platform out and we put it out in massive numbers, then everything will become much easier. Right now everybody's waiting to see if we will be able to pull it off. And if we are able to pull it off, then a lot of things will become easier.

TS: If nonprofits want to get involved and help OLPC, what can they do?

MB: Well, if they have people down in the field, they can help with training. They should be working, first of all, for the countries of deployment; I think Nigeria is going to be the most challenging. So if they have solid proposals that fit within that framework that we set for the initial deployment and so on, I think we can use all the help that we get.