(2018-04-17) OLPC's $100 Laptop Was Going To Save The World - Where Is It Now?

OLPC's $100 laptop was going to save the world. Where is it now? By the time OLPC officially launched in 2007, the “green machine” — once a breakout star of the 21st-century educational technology scene — was a symbol of tech industry hubris, a one-size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems. But more than a decade later, the project’s legacy is more complicated than a simple cautionary tale. Its laptops are still rolling off production lines, and a new model is expected later this year.

Negroponte believed in constructionism: an educational theory that said children should learn by making things and solving problems, rather than completing worksheets or attending lectures.

“Nicholas Negroponte had the insight that the real issue wasn’t a lack of good ideas. The real issue was a lack of access to computers.”

Rabi Karmacharya — whose education nonprofit Open Learning Exchange Nepal runs one of the oldest existing OLPC deployments — says that for people pitching OLPC to their local governments, utopian hype about a $100 self-powering computer wasn’t helpful. It distracted people from the promise of what OLPC was actually building: a tiny, low-power laptop at an incredible price.

OLPC announced plans to launch by the end of 2006, shipping a million laptops apiece to seven countries, as well as smaller numbers to developer communities elsewhere.

Walter Bender, meanwhile, was working on a lightweight operating system designed specifically for children. Sugar OS was built on Red Hat Linux

“It was very tool-oriented: tools for doing things, for making things,” recalls Bender. “It wasn’t curriculum-oriented. It wasn’t a bunch of exercises.”

OLPC pushed the laptop’s cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs.

While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives, not just with the XO-1.

And since OLPC had put so much focus on cost, Bender began to worry that people saw the project as a hardware startup, not an educational initiative. He remembers debating the laptop’s name with Negroponte: instead of “the $100 laptop,” Bender wanted to call it “the Children’s Machine,”

Intel announced that it too was building a cheap educational laptop. The Classmate PC would be small and rugged like OLPC’s design, but run the more familiar Windows XP operating system and sell for somewhere between $200 and $400. As OLPC’s full-scale launch slipped to 2007, and its $100 price tag faded away, Intel shipped the first Classmate PCs to Brazil and Mexico.

Bender thinks OLPC might have struck more deals if it had focused less on technical efficiency. “Every conversation we ever had with any head of state — every time — they said, ‘Can we build the laptop in our country?’”

As development dragged on, the XO-1 started looking less technically impressive, too. In mid-2007, Taiwanese company AsusTek revealed an eye-catching new computer called the EeePC, delivering a cheap, tiny laptop without OLPC or Intel’s educational trappings. The Eee PC had a lot of the XO-1’s drawbacks: slow performance, a tiny screen, a minuscule hard drive, and a cramped keyboard. But the $399 machine was an unexpected success. It sold 5 million units in the first year, and other laptop makers quickly released their own “netbook” computers, fueling a massive boom in cheap, tiny laptops.

At the start of 2008, Mary Lou Jepsen left to found a low-power display company called Pixel Qi. A few months later, OLPC took a step that Walter Bender thought was unforgivable: it compromised its commitment to open source software, partnering with Microsoft to put Windows on the XO-1.

OLPC’s hardware and software sides split up, and Bender kept managing its software under a separate outfit called Sugar Labs. Ultimately, OLPC’s Windows XP model never got beyond a test run, and the laptops use Sugar to this day.

the OLPC Foundation distributed mass-market Motorola Xoom tablets in two Ethiopian villages as a new experiment. In 2012, it reported that children had learned the alphabet within two weeks

A 2012 controlled study in Peru found that laptops hadn’t improved children’s math or language skills, although there were some other cognitive skill improvements.

In early 2014, the Boston-based OLPC Foundation quietly disbanded, and OLPC News shut down

Sameer Verma, an OLPC community leader who sits on Sugar Labs’ oversight board, isn’t discouraged. “Ten years out, I kind of feel like, should I still be doing this?” muses Verma, a professor of information systems at San Francisco State University. “I think it’s still worth it. Because at its very core, this is really about our ability to solve our own problems, right? The more you know, the better off you are.”

Sugar Labs is a self-contained project at this point, and its apps have been ported to a web-based launcher called Sugarizer, which can run on just about any platform.

In 2015, the OLPC Association was bought by the Zamora Terán Foundation, a nonprofit created by Nicaraguan banking tycoon Roberto Zamora.