11 ms·
The ambition of the project has been inspiring, the slowly encroaching failure is a little disheartening. If it's true, however, that the XO spawned the netboo
by jamesmcintyre 17y ago
The ambition of the project has been inspiring, the slowly encroaching failure is a little disheartening. If it's true, however, that the XO spawned the netbook than OLPC has succeeded in an indirect way. First netbooks, then kindle, then Apple's answer to the netbook, then the commoditization of these products, then hopefully the ubiquity of these devices brings cost to a point where something like the XO vision ends up in the hands of the children by shear momentum. Negroponte, and OLPC, has been a catalyst. Don't deny them that much!
- jerf 17y agoNetbooks happened when they did when the hardware prices came down far enough to make them not a complete joke. They are a brain-dead obvious evolution of the laptop platform, just one more step on the almost-equally-braindead-obvious evolution to some form of ubiquitous computing, with our cellphones leading that charge. So yeah, I don't credit them with the netbook idea. That credit goes to the hardware people who drove down LCD and computer prices.
- blasdel 17y agoYeah, the original EEE happened because there were a ton of super-cheap (<$5) portable DVD Player screens, underclocked Celerons, and ancient chipsets flooding the market in Taiwan.
- philwelch 17y agoThe netbook idea isn't even new--it's just a new word for "subnotebook".
- blasdel 17y agoAs someone who purchased several 'subnotebooks' years ago, I can confidently say that 'netbook' is not a synonym. The machines in the 'subnotebook' category cost at least five times as much!