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Comment by starkfist | Hacker News Reader

Did OLPC have anything to do with this? It seemed more like the asian computer makers thought it would be a good idea to roll out machines their own citizens could afford, since it's a gigantic market.

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Initially, no manufacturers were willing to do this. OLPC began designing and spec'ing the initial machine themselves, then worked with an ODM for manufacture. When countries started showing interest, other manufacturers (like Intel) started jumping in to get market share. Once sales commitments hit million unit counts, many manufacturers (ASUS, ACER, MSI) jumped in, later to be followed by OEMs like Dell and HP.

If OLPC hadn't forced the issue, no one would have cut their manufacturing costs and margins to this level.

This is my memory also. Manufacturers were saying that no one wanted the low powered machines... It wasn't until OLPC was able to sell some of theirs with the buy 1 get 1 and the EEEPC (I own a first generation 7 incher) went on sail and people snapped them up so quickly that I had to stalk the local micro center to get the wife one for christmas... Did the other manufacturers think there might be a market for this.

Now we can get a 1.6 Ghz laptop with wifi + camera +windows XP for under 200$ (Saw the Acer netbook for 189 the other day!). Frankly, while they were never able to hit their 100$ sweet spot I think the OLPC project has been a massive success.

Heck, we may even be able to attribute the push for the cloud... and cloud based applications running in a browser... to the low powered laptop movement started by the OLPC project.

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