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The True Cost of One Laptop Per Child
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 08, 2006 05:59 PM
from the good-idea-falls-short dept.
from the good-idea-falls-short dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The '$100 laptop' Negroponte is hoping to put in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations may actually be more like the '$900 laptop.' From the article, 'Jon Camfield says...once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970. This, he says, doesn't even take in to account the additional costs associated with theft, loss, or accidental damage. Camfield contends that such an expensive undertaking should at least be field-tested in pilot programs designed to establish the viability of the project before asking countries to invest millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.'" Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
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when you want to change the world ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When you give the world you should expect change (Score:3)
Re:when you want to change the world ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned how to program a computer on a Timex Sinclair 1000. It cost $100. This computer is a hell of a lot better than the computer I learned on.
And the $800 price tag is hilarious. If you see the interface, you just point and click, there are like a dozen options. A kid will just pick it up and learn it on their own in a few minutes of trying without needing any instruction at all. In a month they will be hacking their own computer programs together.
Worse case a core cadre would train a few people, and then those people would go around training the teachers who get the laptops, and then the teachers would train the students. At most it would only cost the salary of the people doing the training, and in the countries these laptops are destined for, we are not talking very much money at all.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From here [msn.com]. And again, from OLPC [laptop.org] itself:
The Children's Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Education is not like business!
Tiny minds only have a hammer and see only a world of nails.
My teachers didn't teach computers, they had you learn HOW TO LEARN for yourself. Actually, the 1st teacher (4th grade) only knew how to turn it on, get us a LOGO disk, and had read Papert's 1st book.
You don't need corp style training. good lesson plans and nothing else.
Tech Support? Ask the best kid in the village or school. Break it? tough luck, you had a chance you'd not have otherwise.
Theft: put thick plastic area on it for somebody to CARVE a name deep into the casing if they do not have a deep engraver tool. 1 color + its crime for adult use.
Internet? Are you kidding me? Internet does not matter, its optional. In many cases it is better they do not have internet. Forcing the kids to work together and share so they can use the things is far more important, helps if the teachers do this as well.
They can still network with each other.
Software? Hopefully for their own good, they have little software. Unless you want to raise worthless users like here in the USA who think pop software training & for dummy books means they can use a computer (and act almost like its some sort of magic box.)
My high school to this day only teaches typing, they expect kids coming in to figure out the rest.
Parent
Re:when you want to change the world ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the whole ida of the $100 laptop was that the Internet is the easiest way to lots of knowledge. A computer with internet access can supply you with more that $100, $1000, or even $10,000 worth of textbooks.
Parent
Re:when you want to change the world ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I'm going to have to start linking this article [greenstar.org] in every OLPC thread, just to shut people making arguments like yours up.
Parent
Crime (Score:3, Insightful)
Education is probably the best defense against what you describe. I've seen both sides.
It is not education, it is economics (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you may be guilty of what the grandparent was calling hand waving. As described earlier in the thread, crime is a pyramid. Once you rise above the very base level(s) you will find educated people. Crime is not about education, it is often really simple economics (as in microeconomics, how an individual allocates finite resources, time, money, goods, etc). What is the least expensive way that I can satisfy a ne
Laptop Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire POINT... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand the ideal and the sentiment, and no doubt in many places it'll work like a charm. But in one of the cities mentioned, Rio, they already have more than enough computers at the childrens center (in Rosina, the largest favela). The bosses of the favelas can't get people to risk the violence (which isn't even around the childrens center) to go give classes and training.
In Dhaka, another location I've heard mentioned, one of the industries is assembling computers. The problem there is that
Re:The entire POINT... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like the tabloids criticizing celebrities for adopting third-world children. It's fine to question movitation, intent and commitment, but at the end of the day they've done something and you haven't. It's always the people on their asses that seem to worry most about a population's integrity.
Parent
Or drop back to Bikenet (Score:5, Informative)
Or good old "sneakernet", where you carry the disk (or memory stick) from one machine to another when you want to transfer some info.
I was here when broadband was a guy on a bus with a backpack full of floppies, dialing toll-call long-distance from Michigan to Indian Hill Il so I could exchange email (at dollars a call) was a breakthrough in connectivity, and changing resistors on the modem board to raise it from 110 to 300 baud was a major bump in bandwidth. We got a lot of stuff done in those days, too. It was MUCH better than NOTHING. This is the kind of thing people used as they developed stuff that was better.
Third-world countries have already done "networking" by mounting a battery-powered computer plus WiFi AP on a bike and riding a cricuit from town to town. At each town the local machine(s) swap files (including email) with the one on the bike as it goes by, and one of the towns has a connection to the rest of the world. The latency may be severe but the bandwidth of a big hard disk on a bicycle is more than adequate to support serious networking for a province, while the local skills are developed to put in their own successor network.
It's not just a toy. Email-by-bike is a major labor saving versus paper mail. That cost saving can be used both to enable more communication and to free hands for creating other value. And by creating a community of users who'd like more an d better, you KNOW that one of the first targets will be to improve it further.
How long before people in villages connected by "bikenet" decide they want something better, find out how to build pringles-can or big-ugly-dish antennas, and start hopping their WiFi over the hills between? B-)
That's how WE got the internet in the first place: being unsatisfied with the early, slow, expensive ways of networking and building ever better, faster, cheaper-per-bit upgrades. Why shouldn't people in third world countries be able to do something analogous on their own, once they can get their hands on the necessary technology?
Parent
Free software and text exist. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ship 'em a couple of 250 gig HDs full of goodies, like textbooks and freeware and novels and movies, and they'll be okay until the broadband is in place.
So essentially, you set up a couple thousand isolated file sharing network servers in remote African villages, load them with software and other stuff, let the students freely download and share stuff on their village's server, and by the time the internet catches up to them, the **AA can sue them for illegal distribution of copyrighted content! Brilliant idea!
The nine MAFIAA member organizations (four major labels and six major movie studios minus one company that does both) have grounds to sue only infringers of those copyrights that they own. There are plenty of "textbooks and freeware and novels" that can lawfully be reproduced and distributed under blanket permission. Such works are either 1. in the public domain due to the authors' children being long dead (e.g. Gulliver's Travels), or 2. subject to copyright but licensed Freely (e.g. Krita or Wikipedia)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because people are poor doesn't make them stupid. They'll figure it out, and then train each other.
Re:Laptop Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
A far better deal that doesn't exist. Peasants aren't being offered $100 of whatever goods they want. Or even $100. Negroponte doesn't know anything about delivering food or medicine, if he wasn't working on the OLPC, he'd be doing something geeky in California, not joining Jimmy Carter and Bono to build Third World housing or dig wells in Somalia.
If you want to say that instead of X, invest in agriculture, etc, fine. How about instead of: buying billions of dollars worth of arms; gold plated Mercedes for government ministers; flying in hookers and cocaine, etc, etc ... why choose to pick on an education project that is at least targeted at poorer students? We can all quibble about how the OLPC might not be terribly useful, but there are so many things that cost much more that are quite evil and destructive you could take money away from if you had the guts to face the power brokers instead of picking on the most defenceless level of society.
Parent
Fuzzy Accounting (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? And if I replace all my locks, give the bum on the corner a buck, rent a whore off the side of the street for 2 hours in my back seat, buy a tank of gas, stop by the bar and buy a round for everyone, and get a bouquet of roses for my wife, I can buy a gallon of milk for $970 too.
Just kidding, this is
A lot of people are assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe there are a lot of sub $100 mp3 players, here [walmart.com] is one.
I do not have enough information to verify the rest of your comment, but based on what I was able to verify, I have no good reason to believe your opinion. Do provide better supportive arguments if you wish to convince anyone here.
Amazing! Just think of the Intel/Microsoft cost! (Score:5, Funny)
yeah and how much (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yeah and how much (Score:5, Interesting)
On behalf of people here in the developing world, I'd like to thank you for having a brain. 8^)
People in my region are currently negotiating for access to the OLPC project, and you can bet your booties that economic spin-offs are one of the top reasons for the IT community supporting this effort. Just about everyone in the private sector likes the idea expressly because of the fact that these things will require support.
The way costs are expressed in this article are extremely disingenuous. The $30 Billion price tag, for example, is assumed to be a monolithic extra cost that would unquestionably have to be borrowed, because, apparently, heaven forbid that a nation like China actually allocate some of the largest cash reserves in the world to this project. Likewise, I'm not sure how this would cause Brasil, India or even Thailand to break out the begging bowl.
Likewise, why is this investment in infrastructure not compared to the huge investments in basic infrastructure that every single developed nation in the world has made - and continues to make? Perish the thought that a developing nation might see the benefit of following the example of every single successful country in the world. Anyone care to make a similar holistic calculation of how much the US, Canada and Western Europe have invested to introduce computers into the classroom?
Sounds to me like the author slept through economics 101 class. Or like FUD, depending on what you consider the author's motive to be. Whatever this is, it is not science, and it's not logic.
Parent
It's a real Elmer .... (Score:5, Insightful)
OLPC has built-in mesh router (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, that's a whopper. Because according to Eben Moglen [youtube.com]:
(Go to 41:54 in the video. Downloadable version also available [archive.org].)
The rest of his presentation is fantastic, BTW.
Parent
The interent cost (Score:3, Informative)
Funny How Numbers Work (Score:4, Interesting)
(shrug)
Are you freakin kidding me? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "fine" article says
Training?... Uhh, we are talking about poor people here that would _never_ have a computer let alone training. This is not some stupid business expense that we can write off or do some MS-Magic(tm) and make it look like an MS-Solution(tm) would cost less. We are talking about humans that will get a pretty cheap laptop and will... you know... put in the time to learn what they have been given. We are not talking about "rich" Americans or Europeans where having a computer is expected. These laptops are going to people that would never have a laptop... ever.
It is pretty sick to me that some business idiot would try to justify costs going by typical business expenses.
I know what is coming next. Some MS-Study(tm) will show how the OLPC will be more "cost effective" if Microsoft were paid their fees instead of using Linux.
OLPC is pretty cool. I hope they succeed and do well. I hope the corporate greed of MS doesn't get in the way. However, with the recent activity of MS with regards to the OLPC, MS has their sites set on getting a piece of the pie. That can only mean corporate greed will take over the project and poor kids around the world will suffer because of it.
Re:Reality bites. (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in a communist country in the 70's and early 80's. The only computers we had (by we I mean the public, not the government) were donated to us from the west. Weth very few exceptions they came wit no instructions, no manuals, often with very little software. So we learned how to use them. We figured it out. I know people who learned how to program by reading printouts of programs they found somewhere on a floppy with software that happened to have come with a source, and tried to figure out what the program actually does, without even knowing much English. We did have some manuals and books, mostly old editions, also donated, and we circulated these around. Not everybody was able to do that, but there were plenty of us whe could. And believe me that we would be pretty upset if at that time somebody in the west said: "Don't send them computers, they won't be able to use them without having proper trainig and infrastructure."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
These are kids who can barely afford food. Cover the cost of the laptop, and they'll put in the hours.
And if you really think it takes training, sit any 6-year-old down at a computer. They may not know what they're doing, but they'll do something. Take an older kid, teach them about pagedown, put some docs in front of them, and you're good.
Some Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
"The cost is more like $900 per laptop"
What was the hidden cost of rolling out a dozen million Apple II and C64 to a population almost entirely untrained in using and maintaining computers? Has the US economy recovered yet?
"Teachers must be trained on how to use a computer and the internet"
And this is bad how?
Gosh, if we give free books to the kids, we will eventually have to teach them to read ! Shudder...
"Extra money will have to be spent on the network infrastructure"
Why not spent the money on something useful, like fighter jets, or a new, shiny cathedral ?
Once this telecoms infrastructure is in place, these kids will compete for our jobs in call-centers and software development.
Shouldn't we teach them something practical instead, like carving wooden figurines they can sell to tourists?
Important Notes - Original source beyond biased. (Score:4, Informative)
Newsforge, please allow John Dvorak to do his job. Riling up the geeks is easy to do, but the market isn't that big and John needs to make his paycheck. If John hasn't spouted off about how OLPC will do nothing for the developing world, you can expect him to do so.
$970 for a laptop. That is one hell of a total cost of ownership (TCO) argument. The number is preposterous, and in my experience, most total cost of ownership arguments are bunk because the cost estimates are so inaccurate as to be useless.
W
The "real" real cost of the laptop (Score:3, Insightful)
Wonder how he's doing those calculations... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's typical of adults to underestimate how quickly kids learn to do stuff like that themselves if they have the chance - I was replacing components on my C64 by the time I was 8-9 years old, based purely on having diagrams in the manual, despite the fact it was in English (English is my second language - I didn't know a word of English apart from BASIC keywords at the time). Of course not everyone would learn that way, but you don't need everyone to - just a reasonable percentage.
I also note that the article repeats the same old bullshit about lack of access to electricity etc. as a hindrance for internet access - blatantly ignoring that this isn't really the case for the countries signed up so far AND the fact that the unit depends on mesh networking of the boxes themselves to expand the reach of the network, and falling back to the hand crank as a last resort for providing electricity to the unit itself exactly to reduce the infrastructure requirements.
He's also coming out with ignorant statements like "naturally all the countries will be taking out loans to cover this purchase". Ignoring that one of the poorest countries to sign up so far - Nigeria - repaid $10 BILLION in debt over the last couple of years, and as a result got developed nations to forgive another $18 BILLION, saving them many times the cost of the OLPC purchase they'll be making EVERY YEAR in interest payments. The $10 billion was paid back thanks to increasing oil revenue, which is now also freed up for other purposes after the debt repayment is over.
The countries signed up so far aren't the poorest in the world - they are developing countries with reasonable economies. There's no reason why they'd need to take up loads to cover a purchase costing them a few hundred million.
Let's Not Do Anything (Score:5, Insightful)
To extend the reasoning, we shouldn't give food to the poor, because the cost of kitchen cabinets, cookbooks, culinary training, pots and pans, and refrigeration hasn't been adequately factored in or demonstrated as being cost-effective in a real-world test case.
We shouldn't give away free books because the cost of opthalmologists and optometrists haven't been considered, let alone the requisite infrastructure of bookshelves, bookmarks and tables and chairs and reading lamps. Also, the health risks of children carrying heavy loads to and from schools, and the economic livelihoods of book publishers may also be adversely impacted.
It's easy to say something won't work, I guess. On the other hand, I wonder wherein lies the motivation for so many people to go to so much trouble to crush something that offers nothing but endless possibilites. It's fashionable to be a cynic, but when it comes to kids, that kind of thinking should be left at the door.
True cost of a book? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another example of misplaced/abused stats. (Score:3, Interesting)
Given this path of logic the faster, you sell you car the lower the cost. right? The more expensive the car is when you buy it the more money you don't loose by selling it fast. The cost of the laptop is 100 dollars. At no time do I recall them claiming that they would lower the cost of ownership, replacement and or repair. The author of the article needs to go back to school to learn on thing.
Logic no matter how meticulously applied is still false if the opening assumption is wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When rich western people in th
Investment in the Future (Score:3, Interesting)
The Earth's "GPP" (Gross Planetary Product) is about $36T:y in impossible accounting (who would buy all of it from all of us?) With about 6B people. That's average annual productivity of about $6K:y. Since the poorer 50% of humans own only 1% of the world's wealth [scotsman.com], though income is not quite as inequitable, the OLPC kids' parents probably make less than $600:y, leaving maybe $100:y to spend on each kid, tops. So needing $1000 to spend on a laptop that will last maybe 5 years means those kids will consume twice as much just with the new toy. So naturally they'll start producing more, according to well established capitalist laws of supply and demand.
That is, if the kids don't eat the laptop first.
Classist Analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Oh no! What will happen if we let the masses have (x)?
2. How can they know how to manage (x) responsibly? ( by responsibly, they mean: like we prefer them to )
3. So let's not give it to them!
Honestly. It's silly to discourage the development of hardware on the basis that training isn't in place. Of course not. There's no hardware! The lack of expertise and training is a reason for developing the technology, not against it.
Without training, the OLPC experiment will fall flat with a lack of support staff and educational curricula integration. (from the olpc article)
If you put the equipment into the hands of the people, the street will find uses for things. Black and brown people are not stupid. Like all things in life, it's a choice involving certain levels of personal risk. If people will buy one of these laptops, they're going to want training, especially if they stretched themselves financially to obtain it. They're going to be willing to trade (social and material) goods and services for that training. With increased demand for expertise, people with initiative and talent will learn the needed information and skills. This allows a local tech economy to develop. Cost analysis can't explain this situation, which involves more than payouts into something with no return.
If you feel obligated to give everyone formal classes, not only are you insulting their intelligence and controlling what they can or ought to know, but you're pre-emptively aborting certain opportunities for local economic development.
Honestly -- I learned more about computers with Slackware on a 486 (and nothing but the howtos) than most people get in a lot of computer classes. Not everyone can do this (and I'm not suggesting we just throw people in the deep end), but that's the great thing about geeks. They can cut across the traditional socio-economic boundaries because their skills make them useful; it's definitely been the case for me.
If you look at the OLPC article suggesting $970 as the TCO [olpcnews.com] for one of these machines, you see how silly this really is. Ignore, for the moment, their apparent confusion over whose expenses they're describing. Look instead at their actual figures. Where did they get the $108 for initial setup? Can't you just ghost all the machines automatically? Also, how do they get away with putting a dollar value to the effect of potential future political instability on the cost of internet services?
Note: In some developing settings, the introduction of mobile phones has been bittersweet, since not everyone makes wise choices (for people in the West, wealth is a blinding, useful buffer for waste and bad choices. The poor have a different margin of error). People will sometimes go into debt to obtain a mobile (they become a status symbol, or people misunderstand their role/value, or because people have a strong desire to stay connected).
Laptops are bound to create similar issues, but laptops are fundamentally different from mobile phones in their positive, versatile potential. And the introduction of new technology always introduces complex, bittersweet social change.
But mobile phones have been a positive development. According to an article in The Economist, "the London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points [economist.com]. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves."
Muhammad Yunus, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners, has said that "When you [developments.org.uk]
Training Schmaining (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife did a course, however, because she was too cautious to learn that way.
A lot of business expenses for training come from cautious grown-ups who have lost the capacity to learn for themselves.
OLPC at Least Gives Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
So you want me to develop a micro-credit model for poor nations? Because I'm a computer scientist. When will you get it through your head that these are computer scientists trying to do something within their reach for these people? Seriously, we're not wasting an economist's time nor could your average economist even do that. I hate to break it to you, but what your hero Yunus did, I cannot. I apologize for my sever shortcomings.
I'm confused here, do you want me to become super rich and donate to these micro-economic programs? Are you telling me to just magically become an economic genius? I'm sure this guy is a great speaker too, are you expecting me to become that? This guy invented a great banking system, am I just supposed to copy him? Seriously, your comment leaves me quite confused.
Thanks for the suggestion. Keep trying to deter people who are only trying to do what they are best at to help other people. Spread the FUD, keep it up, bro.
Parent
Re:Two problems I always thought (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also: A machine that will break easily (disk drive with mechanical movements), requires far to much electricity to be viable in areas with unreliable electrical supply, isn't rugged enough to withstand rough treatment from children etc.
The far bigger problem is what's the point of giving some one starving a $100 laptop then telling them they can't sell it when that much money would feed some poor families for 4 months? Seems criminal in some ways. 90% have zero hope of making a living with computers so it seems well intentioned but a real let them eat cake program. Trust me they'd rather have the cake, or some rice, than a computer.
And you are yet another one of the people falling in the trap of assuming that this is being given to starving people. Get it into your head: ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE of people in developing countries are starving. MOST have enough to eat. MOST have somewhere to live. This isn't targeted at those who have nothing, but at those who can sustain themselves and who are in a situation where anything that can help their children get a better education to improve their life is high priority.
NONE of the countries signed up so far have any significant starvation problem. NONE of them are among the most desperately poor.
All you've done is yet again repeat stereotypes of the developing world that has no root in reality.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is windows so entrenched in their region that they could not use OO.org or a lightweight office application? Can they read the screen in the sun? Does the more expensive laptop use it's wireless to automatically link up with other laptops?
Once the battery is depleted in a couple years, can they get a replacement battery cheaply? Can th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are correct. Unfortunately, most people can't see the benefit of that in itself. They think you have to have uniform literacy and mass usage right away to have benefits, which is an unnecessary and probably unreachable goal.
A much more likely outcome is that organized training efforts will achieve very little before the money runs out. The first generation of users will be smart kids with free time. They will be eager but clumsy
Why they _won't_ be stolen: (Score:3, Insightful)
When everyone has one, what's the point of stealing one? Who are you going to sell it to?
Your biggest market would be eBay'ing it to nerds who want to write software for it, because of it's general unavailability in first world countries. This option immediately goes away as soon as they ram production and start providing them for higher (but still low) cost to developers who want one to hack code on/play with.
Or to put it in Monty Python terms:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. A self-sufficient VSAT/WiFi station can be plunked down just about anywhere for a few thousand bucks. I do IT in the developing world for a living, so I can tell you authoritatively that the cost-effectiveness of electronic data into the village is vastly greater than shipping books. We've checked. This factors in community-based computer-centres, which are actually much heavier (in terms of capital and maintenance costs) than the OLPC model.
The big liability with regard to books is that they are difficult to protect. Most buildings in the developing world are, surprise surprise, poor quality. In tropical areas, they often don't have doors or windows, so books often barely last through a single school year. Your assumption about books being in fairly good condition might be true when they're loaded into the container, but it generally doesn't take long before they're in tatters. You'd be amazed, actually, how fast things deteriorate.
The biggest liability related to computers and electronic communications is usually power generation. Fuel is bulky and even more difficult to transport than books are. That's why OLPC is enlightened, in my opinion: It's the first such project to take autonomous power generation seriously.
Parent