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.

Western textbooks, especially those which are mandatory to get for certain college classes are expensive, but that’s because of the IP and the small market. Best selling paperback books are already much cheaper per page. If you don’t take copy right into account, which you didn‘t do for the laptop either and also skim on paper and print quality, which is fair enough when comparing to the OLPC, then books are dirt cheap. How cheap you can go in third world countries, I don’t know, but even our student union in Germany was selling self printed lecture scripts with good quality and a hundred pages and more for about 50 cents.