MIT Media Lab Designs $100 Laptop for Education

Imagine a world in which every child has a laptop that can connect with, among other things, the world's major news organizations, libraries, and universities? What could that child do? Better yet, what could they not do? In a new program led by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, children in developing countries such as Africa and China may finally have laptops of their own at a cost of under $100 per laptop. The laptops, scheduled to be distributed by late 2006 or early 2007, will be contain a 500MHz processor running the Linux operating system, 1GB of RAM, and a 1Megapixel color display. Costs will be kept down in part by redesigning the display to use a rear projection image or electionic ink, also developed at the MIT Media Lab. The laptops will be marketed directly to ministries of education particularly in Africa and China in bundles on the order of millions of units and distributed like textbooks, where larger orders will keep per-unit costs down. The laptops will have Wi-Fi wireless connectivity and will connect with each other in a peer-to-peer network "right out of the box". The only real limitation of the $100 laptops compared to more expensive models is that they will lack large amounts of hard disk space. The project is being supported by a consortium of companies including Google, Advanced Micro Devices, and News Corp.