Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

New MIT Laptop gets name

Lord Blackadder

Lord Blackadder

macrumors P6
Original poster
May 7, 2004
15,688
5,525
Sod off
It's now officially called the CM1 (Children's Machine 1), and the specs are impressive, thought the price has climbed to $140.

Still, the screen has a nice res and it has a lot of capability for the money. I will buy one if they end up making it available to the public (I bet they will once production satisfies the original market's demand).
 
What do you think the batterylife of such little critter is? And how large is the screen?
 
From the article I linked above:

Technical details regarding the 8" LCD screen have also been released, and despite the initial skepticism of the naysayers, the folks at MIT have hit a home run. The display will feature 1200x900 resolution. In a statement on the OLPC web site, project chairman Nicholas Negroponte reveals that the CM1 display "has higher resolution than 95 percent of the laptop displays on the market today, approximately one-seventh of the power consumption, one-third of the price, sunlight readability, and room-light readability with the backlight off."
Click to expand...

That's as close as makes no difference to my 15" PowerBook's 1280x854 screen res, but on a screen roughly half the physical size.

I was pretty excited about the possibility of OSX running on it, but I was also relieved when MIT showed no interest in WindowsCE, so it's a wash...

I can't wait to see the final product.
 
bluebomberman said:
I bet they can make some serious money if they sell it here for $250 a pop.
Click to expand...
If they were to sell them direct to consumers (or at least through donated space on the Dell/Apple/etc sites) in the 1st world for $280, I would imagine that they would sell really well. That would enable them to distribute one for free for every one they sell to "us," possibly allowing them to ensure an even larger reach.
 
nbs2 said:
If they were to sell them direct to consumers (or at least through donated space on the Dell/Apple/etc sites) in the 1st world for $280, I would imagine that they would sell really well. That would enable them to distribute one for free for every one they sell to "us," possibly allowing them to ensure an even larger reach.
Click to expand...


That would be a good idea nbs2- hopefully they do something similar to this. :)
 
I wonder how good that little crank for battery charge really works

I heard early on that cranking for 1 minute would produce 1 hour of charge, but I'd like to see a real world figure for this.
 
SuperCompu2 said:
I heard early on that cranking for 1 minute would produce 1 hour of charge, but I'd like to see a real world figure for this.
Click to expand...


I agree, I too would like to see a real world figure for the stated crank time to battery life ratio.
 
Lord Blackadder said:
It's now officially called the CM1 (Children's Machine 1), and the specs are impressive, thought the price has climbed to $140.

Still, the screen has a nice res and it has a lot of capability for the money. I will buy one if they end up making it available to the public (I bet they will once production satisfies the original market's demand).
Click to expand...
Neat little computer.

And if they sell it outright for around $250 as some have suggested, imagine the cash flow they could generate by folks who can donate by purchasing the computer. Cool. Very cool! :cool:
 
I'd buy two in a heartbeat- one for myself (for my inner child - and a windup laptop that never runs down is pretty good for work / camping too) and one for my daughter who is 18 months old and *loves* poking my powerbook screen and pounding on my keyboard!

She really needs to get her own laptop :)

I agree, I hope they will sell to us rich western bastards at 200% markup so that they can donate one free to africa for every one we buy here.

Also the more they sell, the cheaper the manufacturing costs will become.

For a similar project, see the Freeplay windup radio, invented by Trevor Bayliss. I was amazed at how expensive they were when they first came out, but realised they were correctly trying to get us westerners to subsidise them.
 
Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought they deleted the crank function - I hope not though, it's one of the coolest parts of the computer.

I would willingly pay $250 - $280 if most of the profit went to distributing the 3rd-world version where it's intended to go - that's the point of this thing anyway.
 
Lord Blackadder said:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought they deleted the crank function - I hope not though, it's one of the coolest parts of the computer.
Click to expand...

Hand power of some sort is still alive, but they don't seem so have decided if the option will use a crank or something else. Here's their wiki page on the machine. (they seem to have renamed it already, to 2B1)

I would willingly pay $250 - $280 if most of the profit went to distributing the 3rd-world version where it's intended to go - that's the point of this thing anyway.
Click to expand...

Hm, maybe if it's made in something other than that weird green :/
 
Ya, the whole handcrank idea is awesome, but i'm not too certain how feasible it is. But if they do w/o it, they would leave behind the many people who don't have electricity. That thing better be able to play mp3s lol.
 
as soon as the first ones ship for real they will certainly show up at ebay for ridiculous prices. there is a website somewhere where they plan to sell you one for three times the price and give two cm-1's to third world kids for free.

i hope that works out because it's a win/win for everybody.
 
It's lime-green as a social theft deterrent. In their intended setting (developing communities, not necessarily strictly third-world), not many folks would steal a bright lime-green laptop computer if the society around them generally recognized that they were expressly for their childrens' education. That's the idea anyway. It's also like a mail truck – nobody steals a mail truck, because nobody wants a mail truck-looking vehicle. There's just no market.

If you haven't already, click on over and view Nicholas Negroponte's TED Talk. It gives a very good overview of the project. Negroponte's philosophy is that the solution to the common problems afflicting these developing countries (poverty, famine, environmental concerns, etc.) is education. He looks at computing devices as tools of education – when children are given tools to learn on their own (not necessarily by the aid of teachers), they're more equipped to make life better for themselves and others. Negroponte really views this as an Education project... not a Laptop project.

I'm sure this has been mentioned before in prior MacRumors discussions, but the machine runs Linux and not OS X because then the OS would be non-restricted, open source, and, essentially, free. I seem to recall Jobs and Gates both offered free licenses for their OSes for the project, but the team opted not to so that they weren't dependent on an individual corporation... the child, in a sense, truly "owned" every part of the computer.

I like both names. CM1 is alright, while 2B1 also has a real snappiness to it. I'm trying to think of some witty educational explanation for the name – "to be one"? Hmm.

I don't know if I'd want one myself (although they're definitely neat), but I'd definitely love to take part in supporting the world's children in this way. They could very easily get "sponsors" to fund a laptop purchase for a child in another part of the world, even if the sponsor got nothing in return. Putting this out on the consumer market does have it's advantages too, but I imagine the technology will drift its way to that market anyway, even if not put out by the One Laptop Per Child organization.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back