The myth, the dream, the conspiracy, the $100 laptop

It's all over the news and opinion blogs this week: The fabled $100 laptop. Whatever happened to the thing? And will it ever reach that magic price point?

It all began with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aimed to put little, green, $100 notebooks in the hands of third world children around the globe. OLPC got off to a promising start in 2005, with laptops originally priced at $188 and the hope of distributing millions of machines in the coming years. But early machines met with mixed reviews (they are very difficult to use), and after the end of the organization's $399 "give one, get one" program (which let you buy two machines, one for yourself and one to donate to a child overseas), sales have tapered off dramatically in 2008, with OLPC now facing infighting, criticism, and plenty of competition. And never did the OLPC hit that $100 price point.

Too ambitious, too soon? Consider what's happening elsewhere in the market: Gartner is now saying that the $100 laptop may be doable... in 2011. Right now, the analyst firm notes that mini-notebooks, an industry spawned directly by the OLPC project, are all priced well above the $100 level. In fact, if you look at the rush of companies jumping into this market, prices are going up, not down. When Asus pioneered the consumer-level "super-cheap laptop" last year with its best-selling Eee PC, the cheapest model sold for $299. Cheap, but not $100 cheap. Yet consumers have since been asking for more features and capabilities, not lower prices. Asus's most recent Eee model sells for up to $699. Other companies, including Hewlett-Packard, sell mini-notebooks for well into the $700s... which is strange, because you can get a regular, off-the-shelf notebook for $400 at your local Wal-Mart. As PC World notes, chip vendors are in no hurry to make low-cost, low-profit chips, either.

If anyone's going to hit $100, it will have to be a machine specifically designed for budget consumers, which brings us back to the troubled OLPC. If you believe all the gossip, though, it wasn't ambition or mere competition from other "netbooks" like these that have given the OLPC project its bumpy ride. It was dirty tricks, and fingers are being pointed squarely at Intel and Microsoft, which critics claim are trying to protect their monopolies by kicking open-source, low-cost projects like OLPC (which suspiciously uses an AMD CPU) to the curb. The Times Online has a huge, six-page story about the squabble, but the gist is that OLPC claims that when it chose AMD over a waffling Intel for the project, Intel went nuclear by creating its own ultra-cheap PC, the Classmate. Microsoft also sided with Intel since the OLPC had a home-grown Linux-based OS, but it's since come around: A new version of the OLPC is now creating a machine that can run either its own OS or Windows. Intel, however, has severed ties with the OLPC group and is digging in for a fight.

Meanwhile, others aren't giving up on the $100 dream. In fact, one group of designers and engineers is looking to bust straight through to double digits: $12, in fact, inspired by rudimentary consoles in India that are connected to a television for a display. This team is actually "souping up" old Apple II computers, even giving them web access. It's a far cry from the sexy, rubberized lines of the OLPC, but it may have more legs than any of its corporate-backed projects. After all, who's going to go out of their way to bury a Frankenstein computer built from 25-year-old parts?

Don't answer that.