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Re: Intel, AMD Wage High-Stakes Battle Over Low-End Laptops
Posted by: John P. Mello Jr. 2007-05-22 11:30:01
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A tiff between the world's largest chipmaker and an organization selling low-priced laptops to the developing world will ultimately benefit poor kids, according to one tech aid expert. "I think it's wonderful that Intel and OLPC are now competing," Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News and director of Geekcorps, told TechNewsWorld. "The greatest thing about this," he continued, "is that it has increased the opportunities for these countries to experiment with computing and bring computing to some very tough environments.
Intel is not competing, Intel wants to kill OLPC
Posted by: Charbax 2007-05-25 18:26:11 In reply to: John P. Mello Jr.
I really find it strange that Wayan Vota wants to defend Intel in this blind way. How does he know all the specifics of those price dumpings and other lobying from Intel in the countries in question? Why isn't the fact that Intel is selling the Classmate in small quantities only and at the half of the price it actually costs for them to actually produce as they say locally? Which by the way is a totally ridiculous idea since assembling laptops is not the kind of job you want to have locally, since it doesn't require any skills, it's hard labour, you might as well suggest Uruguay to hand produce their own socks instead of importing them from China for 5 cent a pair. What you want is to develop a whole local IT market based around USB accessories and software optimizations. It's only with OLPC's Linux OS that you can have some localizations made and custom software easilly developped by the local software industries.
The Intel Classmate actually costs $400 to produce, Intel does not want to mass produce cheap laptops, they just want the project to fail and maybe get back to it in a few years once they have made more billions on selling expensive processors around the whole bloated Windows Vista scheme. Cause once cheap laptops are mass produced, even if they are targeted at the children in the developping world at first, they will then immediately also become available commercially since OLPC is a hardware and software open-source project. Any company, be it Quanta, Dell or Wal-Mart is welcome to come and use all the technological revolutions made by the OLPC project and commercialize it in the first world. Licencing required to pay for OLPC patents would then go to further subsidize the OLPC laptops sent to the poorer countries. And so you can be sure there will be $200 mass produced adult keyboard/screen sized laptops available in Wal-Marts in just a few months after that the first 3 million OLPCs are distributed to the first children. And that is the whole scare is at for Intel. Intel does not want $200 Linux laptops available in Wal-Mart anytime soon, cause such low prices for laptops spoils all the large profit margins that Intel and Microsoft are pumping out of the total marketing monopoly that their PC standard has in the first world and the developping world.
The Intel Classmate actually costs $400 to produce, Intel does not want to mass produce cheap laptops, they just want the project to fail and maybe get back to it in a few years once they have made more billions on selling expensive processors around the whole bloated Windows Vista scheme. Cause once cheap laptops are mass produced, even if they are targeted at the children in the developping world at first, they will then immediately also become available commercially since OLPC is a hardware and software open-source project. Any company, be it Quanta, Dell or Wal-Mart is welcome to come and use all the technological revolutions made by the OLPC project and commercialize it in the first world. Licencing required to pay for OLPC patents would then go to further subsidize the OLPC laptops sent to the poorer countries. And so you can be sure there will be $200 mass produced adult keyboard/screen sized laptops available in Wal-Marts in just a few months after that the first 3 million OLPCs are distributed to the first children. And that is the whole scare is at for Intel. Intel does not want $200 Linux laptops available in Wal-Mart anytime soon, cause such low prices for laptops spoils all the large profit margins that Intel and Microsoft are pumping out of the total marketing monopoly that their PC standard has in the first world and the developping world.
