‘$100 Laptop’ to Roll Off Production Lines in Q2 ’07

The laptop PC at the heart of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative aimed at schoolchildren in developing countries will start rolling off production lines in the second quarter of next year.

Taiwan’s Quanta Computer, the largest contract notebook PC manufacturer in the world, was tapped by the OLPC project to produce the low-cost devices, and says it’s gearing up to play its part.

OLPC Concept Photo

Although the final numbers will depend on how many orders come in for the “$100 laptop,” Quanta expects to produce 10 million of the devices in the first year of production, a company representative said Monday.

The OLPC group, led by Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC and a cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to offer the low-cost laptops to governments and organizations around the world as an educational tool to ensure schoolchildren in poor nations keep up in the digital age. A number of academic and industry groups worked together on the project to come up with the $100 laptop design.

An improvement to inexpensive liquid crystal display (LCD) technology was key to pushing the cost of the laptop so low, according to the OLPC website. OLPC improved LCDs commonly found on inexpensive DVD players, resulting in a laptop screen costing $35. Normally, such screens make up hundreds of dollars of the cost of a notebook PC.

OLPC also reduced the amount of software in the laptops, cutting the fat out of the system. “Today’s laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways,” the OLPC website says.