In its effort to bring computers to emerging nations, the non-profit trade organisation One Laptop per Child has linked up with some of the world's largest contract manufacturers and component suppliers to build its low-cost machines.
Chipmaker Intel, meanwhile, is working with companies such as Zinox, a hardware maker from Nigeria you've probably never heard of.
The difference could prove pivotal in determining which vision for expanding computing into emerging nations spreads more broadly and rapidly. By centralising manufacturing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) says it can keep the cost of its XO computer to a minimum. Taiwan's Quanta will make the laptops while Chi Mei Optoelectronics and FoxConn will supply the screens.
The laptops cost $150 (£76.55) to make and will go down over time, according to OLPC's founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, and this year about one million of the machines will be made each month. The organisation is also trying to get governments to subsidise its programmes.
"OLPC has one goal: to maximise the number of children who have a connected laptop," wrote Negroponte in an email. "Intel views children as a market and we view them as a mission."
By contrast, PCs based on Intel's Classmate PC blueprint will cost about $300 (£153) this year and eventually get below $200 (£102), said Jeff Davies, vice president of the Move Ahead programme at Intel. Although potentially more expensive, the Intel systems will be made in the regions in which they'll be sold, which will lead to local job growth, better customer support and, ideally, the start of a local IT industry. The infrastructure in many places already exists, Davies added.
"Eighty percent of the PCs in Pakistan are assembled by Pakistani companies," he said.
Companies such as Taiwan's Via Technologies take a similar tack. Via collaborates with universities and local manufacturers in Africa and India to develop inexpensive PCs and thin clients based on its chips.
"One factor is local job support and one is local tech support. When the products are out in the field, who is going to stand by and support them? Support is absolutely critical," said Richard Brown, vice president of marketing for Via. "Often, schools want to buy locally."
Who's right? Who knows, but analysts and outsiders tend to lean toward the Intel and Via view of things.
"There's something to be said for having regional knowledge about your audience," said Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC. "If you do a cookie cutter approach, you can do it more cheaply, but it may not fit the existing situation."
The "build local" ethos can also definitely affect local economies, said Wayan Vota, the director of Geekcorps, which helps…
Talkback
I'm sure that even though Intel has Ultra Low Voltage x86 chips, that the Classmate simply does not compare with the OLPC in terms of power usage.
I'm just guessing here, but probably that the Classmate consumes 10 times more power. For what? Well just to run an unoptimized Windows XP OS you need lots of wasted cycles, because it is the world champion in bloat-ware.
It's just a law of nature, that making hardware to support Windows XP costs at least twice as much and consumes 10 times as much energy as a hardware optimized for consumer-electronics like Linux OS, with a new concept of cheap screens, and advanced way of saving energy on the x86 processor and a co-processor running the Wi-Fi always-on Mesh independantly from the main CPU.
Nearly a year ago, when Intel launched their Classmate then called Eduwise at WCIT, I interviewed some representatives: http://wcitvideo.com/?p=15 and I asked them why they wouldn't rather do a solution using their Intel Xscale processor, and why they wouldn't spend their billions of R&D on bloat-free Linux OS and applications suitable for saving a lot of CPU cycles, managing RAM more effectively and thus saving a lot of energy. The response I got is that Windows XP is the worlds most popular OS, thus there are already a whole infrastructure one can have working natively on a Windows XP platform.
I think the point is that Intel doesn't want cheap computers, doesn't want people to start being aware of consuming less CPU cycles, Intel loves bloat-ware because that sells more expensive more power hungry processors that people don't need, Intel loves Microsoft because their partnership creates a computer industry that keeps the average price of computers high every year (just look at the hardware requirements required to run Windows Vista!!), meaning huge profits on both sides. Intel probably realises that the OLPC can change the industry, cause when most normal people realize that they do not need to buy the latest most expensive, most power consuming fastest processors, then people will suddently realise they can have even better, more stable and less power hungry solutions for half the cost of a normal computer, this will mean less profit margins for CPU manufacturers. Intel is simply trying to delay this from happening instead of accepting to participate in revolutionnizing the computer industry for the cheaper, simpler and much lower power usage.
My blog: http://charbax.com
When SCO made outrageous statements in 2003, I knew that it did not have any factual reason to do it, so it should be something else. Now we know that SCO wanted to straighten out its financials by being purchased by IBM. Then Microsoft saw a chance to delay progress of GNU/Linux by keeping SCO alive, and allow time for the release of Windows Vista. SCO is going to take some beating today in court. But it was a good thing for the entire open-source community, because now GNU/Linux has projected a strong image and a few GNU/Linux distributions have acquired a larger user share.
But Intel did not learn the lesson. By promoting an expensive, badly engineered competition with the OLPC, Intel is giving notoriety to Negroponte's team, so my feeling is that the Classmate is a loss leader that backfired. Its battery charge lasts up to 4 hours, while the OLPC's lasts 4 to 8 hours, depending on usage. The Classmate is not even good as a loss leader.