Those crazy Europeans will be able to buy an XO Laptop, too. Amazon’s Euro stores will sell the little guy for £263 (or €313 or $390). That’s strange, considering the One Laptop Per Child program was initially billed as the $100 laptop. What are you gonna do?
The Guardian, home of the Football Weekly podcast, calls the whole program a “flop,” noting that it has fallen well short of its 100 million laptops sold goal. (To date, about 600,000 has been sold.)
And what does your Euros and Pounds gets you? A 433MHz AMD processor, 256MB of RAM and a pack of gum.
Yes, it’s underpowered for the money, but you’re also Doing Good—it’s part of the get one, give one program—by buying it, so there’s that.
There is no Amazon in Europe, only national Amazon in UK, France and Germany.
ok, first off. you are buying TWO, as in not just one laptop. The price is ~$390 for one laptop for yourself and one for a child elsewhere in the world… So the price works out to be only ~$200 and the second one is, in the USA at least, a Tax Deductible gift and yes this was supposed to be the $100 laptop, but the problem is with the economy of scale. IF they got the orders that where originally slated then the price could have been reduced a lot. They also made a lot of choices that made the hardware a lot more expensive then originally planned. Like the feature that the screen’s backlight can be turned off and used as a gray scale ebook-like screen it is VERY crisp and makes for VERY long battery life. Also, the screen is very usable in full sun, unlike my $1500 laptop which is just UNUSABLE in the sun. They had to develop that screen in house, and that cost more, but made a LOT better end product, but they could not just buy the second quality already being made glass that was in the original idea. It was quite a few concessions that made the OLPC XO-1 cost a lot more, but the one thing that upsets me most is when someone is comparing this $200 laptop to a $400-$600 laptop, because they are giving it an unfair write up.
-t
Asus Eee PC was supposed to be $199 and it was released at $399 wh aren’t you complaining about Asus instead?
OLPC XO is still and remains the cheapest laptop in the world. And it has man features that makes it much better then any Asus or any other commercial Intel powered netbooks.