OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

The real reason why OLPC failed is that children in downtrodden countries don't need a laptop. They need food, a healthy environment, good old fashioned classroom education and plenty of pens and notebooks. A laptop is the worst tool you can use for studying.

I went through my entire school and undergraduate college without once bringing my laptop into the classroom. My mother and father learned to program in FORTRAN using nothing but pen, paper and the occasional slide rule.

Paper books, decent sized notebooks and ballpoint pens. Spend $100 on that. That will actually help. This whole project was solving a first world problem in the third world.

Paper books are expensive to print, warehouse, and ship.

If someone could make a robust laptop for $100 I could easily believe in it being a net gain, even if it was only ever used for reading textbooks.

No. Paper books for schoolchildren are extremely cheap[0]. They work without power. They work even after getting a bit wet. They work even if you sit on them. You can highlight and underline stuff on the pages. You can share it easily. You can even take small notes on the books. You can do exercises right on the book. You can take photocopies easily. There is simply no competition.

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Books-NCERT/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A97...

While printing is cheap, the licensing of the content often is not and can vary from country to country.

If textbooks were cheaper, Khan Academy would not be successful.

Open Educational Resources (OER) hopefully will make some inroads on this but until then, textbooks are generally more expensive.

Licence costs aren't an inherent advantage of 'digital' distribution over paper, though.

But if we could get to the stage where the licensing costs are are small compared to the production costs, the laptop would do better, because it could contain thousands of books.

Correct, but do student need thousands of books. Maybe 20-30 per year?

That sounds reasonable. So with the OLPC's (pie-in-the-sky) design lifetime of 10 years, maybe it should be compared to 200-300 books.

But if you could get thousands of books on a laptop you wouldn't need to know _which_ 200 books a given child would benefit from most.