April 27, 2007 10:23 AM
$100 Laptop No More
Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project which was previously announce to be sold for $100 dollar in poor countries, has just increased its price to 175. But despite this price increase, the OLPC group is still confident that the project would still generate enough orders from different countries.
OLPC founder, Negroponte said:
We are at the most critical stage of OLPC's life," he said. "A year and a half ago, we were selling a dream, but it's easy to sell dreams if you're passionate and can share that passion with other people. But that was dreams, and now we've got to launch. We need three million units to trigger the supply chain.
Currently, several countries have already expressed intention of buying several hundreds of OLPC $100, err $175 laptop and it was recently reported that even the U.S. is keen on purchasing tons of units for its own poor citizens who cannot afford higher end PCs for their home use.
$175 dollar would seem a reasonable price still for the said OLPC laptop. But I just hope that the manufacturer stop from there and would not further increase the price despite the growing demand for the laptops even before its official release. Unless, the project’s original purpose of bringing one laptop for every child gets defeated by some other purposes.
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