OLPC Laptop Costs Rise to $175

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The world’s crappiest laptops, designed to punish the already poverty-stricken children of the world, will now rise past the $150 mark reported here, all the way up to $175.

And it seems that if the governments of these poor countries do not pony up over half a billion dollars to get the first 3 Million of these beasts manufactured, the whole project may collapse. Somehow, Citibank has been swindled into fronting the money for these impoverished countries to buy these laptops, on the hopes that Citibank gets paid back some day.

From the AP here:

The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”

That’s partly because at least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white “XO” computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash. The project needs orders for 3 million machines so its manufacturing and distribution effort can get rolling. (That’s 525,000,000 Dollars!)

The ever-optimistic Negroponte didn’t sound worried, however: He expects mass production to begin by October, and he said many other countries, including Peru and Russia, have been inquiring about taking part.

Even so, the machine — which boasts extremely low electricity consumption, a pulley for hand-generated power, built-in wireless networking and a screen with indoor and outdoor reading modes — now costs $175. The One Laptop project takes an additional $1 to fund its distribution efforts.

XO’s software is highly original, in hopes of making the computer useful as a collaborative tool and intuitive for children who have never before encountered a computer. There are no windows or folders, but rather an interface heavily reliant on pictographic icons.

What happened to Google funding this project? Or was that just the development? And notice how the story’s author uses words like “optimistic” and describes the software as “highly original?” I think its code for “doomed project” and “unusable software.”