Nicholas Negroponte, founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, unveiled a new design for a cheap laptop on Wednesday.
A very cheap laptop: $100, to be exact. It runs Linux, has a 500 Megahertz processor, about a gig of memory (at least some of which may be Read Only Memory) and wireless Internet access. It's designed to be given away en masse to children of Third World countries such as China and Brazil, and as such has a rugged rubber exterior, as well as a hand crank to power the built-in battery - no need to plug it in.
Strangely enough, many American geeks who ordinarily swoon over the newest, greatest and most expensive gadgets available are salivating over Negroponte's laptops. Unfortunately, it's doubtful that the laptops will ever see the light of day as a commercial product in the United States, thanks in part to licensing agreements between development partners such as AMD and Red Hat Linux. (And, oddly enough, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)
And why shouldn't Americans envy the bounty that's about to be given away to the Third World? Many students on this campus have fairly up-to-date laptops which tend to be fragile and expensive things. If a laptop owner trips while running or falls while biking, their biggest worry isn't a skinned knee, it's having to replace their brand-new $1,000 paperweight. And while the UT campus is relatively laptop-friendly, many public spaces, such as coffee houses and airports, are not, as witnessed by the relatively fierce competition for a seat near a power outlet.
But don't count on seeing a rugged exterior or a hand-crank battery integrated into a Dell or Apple model anytime soon.
Truly rugged systems would need to back away from the huge, bright, thin displays we've become used to, and designing a laptop that didn't need to be constantly cranked up would require a step back to much slower processors and much smaller hard drives.
It's not that such systems couldn't be designed, or that there wouldn't be a sizable consumer demand for them. Rather, switching towards such components would put thousands of development engineers out of work and decimate the gross profits of many electronics manufacturers. Once a consumer has a cheap laptop that won't be easily destroyed, and once that consumer realizes they don't constantly need to update their laptop to check e-mail and surf the Web, sales of laptops will fall dramatically.
Free market economists will argue that the corporations don't get to decide what's in demand, but rather the consumers themselves. However, consumers can only demand something if they know that product is available - and as it is, most consumers are extremely ignorant when it comes to technology (which is completely understandable given how rapidly technology changes).
Most of the people purchasing computers at Best Buy, at the Apple Store or on Dell's Web site have only the vaguest idea of what gigahertz and gigabytes are; those who do have an understanding of what those terms mean are probably adherents to the oversimplified idea that "More is Better."
Consumers who are truly aware of the complicated trade-offs between processing power, memory capacity, device size, energy consumption and functionality are few and far between. Most of the rest can be steered towards various product lines with a slick marketing campaign, and a complete lack of discussion of what other alternatives might be available in a truly open market.
But the engineers that would be put out of work by a cheap-laptop economy aren't just faceless figures, they're an integral part of the economic cycle. To put it bluntly (and to oversimplify to the point of absurdity) - if engineers didn't get money from developing the latest and greatest laptops, then there wouldn't be any money to buy laptops at all. Or, to put it another way, the companies making Negroponte's laptops can only make them if they're profitable in the first place.
Ironically, Negroponte can only build his laptops if his own country doesn't get to use them. We're caught in a particularly odd catch-22: Our economy can produce profoundly interesting, important, life-changing technologies, but we can never appreciate a sizable share of the moral good those technologies produce. And laptops are just one example of this phenomenon: While there's certainly a good deal of fat to be trimmed from the budget of drug companies, many life-saving pharmaceuticals deployed overseas are only possible thanks to essentially superfluous drugs such as Viagra.
Americans are caught in a shiny, sparkly technological cage of their own devising, wrapped up in high definition DVDs, gigabytes of MP3s and a constant barrage of instant cell phone messages. But, in the end, it may be that the scraps from our cage are truly best, most useful things we'll end up making.
Jones is an electrical and computer engineering graduate student.
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