One Laptop Per Child: "Get One, Give One "
How about this -- a durable, wireless-capable, all-open-source laptop for $399. Even better, that's for *two* of the machines -- one of them goes to a child in a developing nation.
Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home. If you're interested in Give 1 Get 1, we'll be happy to send you a reminder email. Just sign up in the box to the left and you'll receive your reminder prior to the November 12 launch date.
posted by Andrew at 5:57 PM
3 Comments:
One thing I have heard about this offer from some cynical tech people is that this is a sign that they are not getting enough orders for the OLPC system from governments (who they had initially planned to sell to exclusively during the roll-out of the project).
I hope that's not true, as this seems like an interesting program.
The OLPC program has some serious critics and there is lots of pro/con info about the program on the web. To summarize, what you've heard is correct -- there weren't enough orders from governments to generate the volume necessary for a true "$100 laptop."
FWIW it seems pretty obvious why ordering millions of these laptops didn't pencil out for governments of developing nations, even at $100. In Nigeria, for example, the per capita GDP is approx $1,500/year vs $43,000/year for the US. Prorated, spending $200 on a laptop for a child in Nigeria is the economic equivalent of spending $2,867 on a laptop for a child in the USA.
So for now, the laptops are $200 each, with consumers helping subsidize the program directly. Getting one of the laptops seems like a pretty good incentive for making a donation.
Even if there are flaws in the original business model, I think the OLPC program is a worthy vision and hope it works over time. In the meantime, the technologies alone make it an interesting experiment.
As long as the spreadsheet is fired up, I couldn't keep myself from doing this:
55,800,000 K-12 students in USA
* $200 per OLPC laptop
------------------------
$11,160,000,000
to provide one laptop for every K-12 student in USA
$2,000,000,000 per-week cost of Iraq War
therefore....
We need 5.58 weeks without Iraq War expenditures to provide a $200 laptop for all 55.8 million K-12 students in the USA
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