$100 OLPC To Cost $175

Some updates on the One Laptop Per Child project hit the newswire last week. Negroponte, the leader of the project, announced how much his computers will cost.

The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

If you want to read something more thought provoking, here is a Forrester blog post on the computer, called the XO.

The XO laptop is designed for social computing. It is the social computer. One of the main apps is a screen that shows who else in the village is online — in fact, the whole system gets its Internet access from a mesh so that if one XO in the village can reach the net (presumably from a classroom or some other central location, often by satellite), the others can all reach it too through their own connections.

Also, on a unrelated but related note, check out this article in today’s NY Times about schools in the US dropping laptop programs because there was no evidence that it had a positive impact on student achievement.

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