Mannerisms

Forget the $100 laptop envisaged in the XO laptop design of OLPC, the new goal is the $75 laptop, and it’s being pursued by no less a figure than the former CTO of the OLPC project.

Mary Lou Jepsen has set up a company called Pixel Qi after leaving OLPC last month.

“The XO laptop is perhaps the most innovative laptop made in the last several years. We feel this is just a first step in the transformation of personal computing.”, says a Pixel Qi company statement, “Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras.”

Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use.

“I believe that looking at computers in a new, holistic, systemic way, with a clean-sheet approach to computer design - rather than incrementally increasing the horsepower of the CPU - is critical to bringing computing and Internet access to more than the 1 billion affluent who now are its beneficiaries”, says Jepsen on the Pixel Qi site, “the key is a new generation of low-cost, low power, durable, networked computers, leveraging open-design principles.”

“A computer is not just its CPU”, says the Pixel Qi site, “ today, we can approach displays as like ASICs, and use this approach to lower the cost of this expensive, power-hungry component. Thus, for the XO, it was essential to simultaneously re-think the computer platform, and to re-think how the display was to be made - along the way becoming the first person to convince a large LCD manufacturer to make an externally-developed design.”

With such an iconoclastic attitude as that, why not use an ARM processor running Linux?