Look out, here comes the $75 dollar laptop

Mary Lou Jepsen, former Chief Technology Officer of the One Laptop Per Child, is working to make a $75 laptop a reality. In January, she announced she was leaving OLPC to start her for-profit company, Pixel Qi. The laptop, which is cheaper than the claimed $100 OLPC laptop (currently around $188), is still in the early design phase. Realizing a $75 laptop is a significant technical and financial challenge. As the OLPC project has shown, getting there is not easy especially when established companies such as Microsoft and Intel have made public comments against such a laptop. Newsweek has a short article where they asked Mary Lou Jepsen about the laptop.

What kind of laptop are you getting for just $75?
It can do everything a regular laptop can do and more: it has three times the wireless range, a sunlight-readable screen, a battery that lasts for 20 to 30 hours. And you can drop it.

This notion is undoubtably a game changing concept that has many within the computer industry at odds with each other. Low cost laptops are a new market. Every year, new laptops are introduced with faster processors, larger screens, longer lasting batteries and more storage space. The processors that drive laptops have become so fast that they require loud fans to cool the heat they generate.

What's the key to driving the price down to $75? "Volume," she says. Putting a laptop within reach for every person on the planet, all 6.5 billion of us, will help reduce cost and help the laptop become a commodity product. There is no doubt, however, that in the end, consumers win.