The Throw-away Laptop

Unimaginable, you might think. These are prestige tools. Anyone who's anyone has one. No one who's anyone is going to carry around anything throw-away.

But the electronics industry is good at making things disposable which were once luxury goods.

Electric calculators used to cost hundreds of pounds before transistors came out. Only offices had them.

Now you get electronic calculators in Christmas crackers.

Electronic watches cost several hundred pounds when they first came out, now they're cheap as chips.

Mobile phones are abandoned with the same alacrity as umbrellas.

Could laptops go the same merry route to throw-awayness as calculators, mobiles and brollies?

MIT's One Laptop Per Child programme has come up with a $100 laptop. A company called Novatium, in India, is doing the same. Intel has come up with one called Classmate which costs $300 now but is expected to be around $200 by year's end.

These are intended for children in the third world but, once developed, this is an idea which is here to stay.

People find the idea of ultra-cheap, stripped down, laptops too attractive for it to stay out of the wider market, whatever the commercial interests of the mainstream laptop manufacturers may be.

You probably won't get a laptop in your cracker next Christmas, but you could, just could, get one in your stocking.