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Comment by arbirk | Hacker News Reader

As a child of aid workers (hippie parents) I lived as a kid and teen in southern Africa. I was critical of the OLPC project mainly because it was a closed eco system, but told to shut up.

Poor communities are used to repairing everything that can be repaired and it seemed to me, that giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point.

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Is there such a thing as a standard PC (actually, laptop) platform? Some manufacturers are better than others at repairability, but between two different laptop models, even from the same manufacturer, the only things likely to be interchangeable are the RAM and the storage. The OLPC had repairability designed into it, but on the assumption that there'd be a large enough deployment of them in any given area, and you'd scavenge broken ones for parts.

I honestly don't think that it would have been much different in this respect had the OLPC been a single model of a consumer-grade laptop - parts would have been scavenged from broken ones. Except perhaps that consumer-grade laptops weren't designed for the conditions the OLPC was designed for, so would probably have failed more often.

absolutely. The OLPC looked like a well intentioned design-by-committee attempt of the first world people to solve the issue of the 3rd world.

>giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point

i've been in similar situation - end of 198x / start of 199x in Russia where we like the 3rd world were scrambling into computerization, and the standard PC platform with easy swappable/upgradeable components was the key here to the extent that even slightly non-standard brand-name PCs like Compaq/etc. were shunned away because the even so slightly customizations they had to their case, PSU, high-end adapters with custom drivers, custom usually non-upgradeable motherboards, etc. were making them practically feasible only to very rich companies/people.

A much better starting point would be to make laptops able to be as easily repaired as a normal PC.

PCs at the time were much more expensive, ran closed source Windows (versus open sourced Linux of OLPC), weren’t good ebook readers given their screen technologies, didn’t have mesh networking technologies, and a whole host of other things that made the OLPC far more interesting and hypothetically relevant to the problem they were trying to solve.

Having owned a range of second hand junk laptops at the time I assure you they ran Linux just fine. As did new machines.

The rest is true enough and I'd add that there wasn't anything nearly as rugged at the price (used Toughbooks, or that style, were more expensive).

There wasn’t anything at the price.

I vaguely recall Intel had some rugged convertible Classmate PC. It was sturdy and the price was reasonable but its performance was bad (like most netbooks).

It was well over double the price of OLPC, and had different functionality.

Yes, I was referring to a rugged (child proof) laptop. I think I got mine around 500 USD, not cheap, but cheaper than the Thoughbook. Hence my reply.

Yes, but the Classmate was created in response to the OLPC laptop. From its Wikipedia page:

> The Classmate PC represents Intel's competitive response to the OLPC XO, whose unusually low prices and use of AMD chips threatened to steal market share from Intel and other major manufacturers.

iPhone internals are difficult to repair, but they make up for it with reliability. If OLPC had hit that target they could have been successful but it was basically not achievable for a mid-2000s laptop.

The iphone isn't actually that hard to repair. If you have the parts and the tools, almost all the parts can be replaced pretty quickly. The problem is a lot of the parts that tend to fail like a screen replacement or water damage to the main board cost as much in parts as the phone is worth. Which in a way makes sense because the screen and main board make up pretty much all the value of the phone.

The nice thing is they have come a very long way in terms of battery replacements. You can get it done by apple for quite cheap and soon you will be able to buy the battery officially.

But improving phone repairability wouldn't really do much for poor communities because it is more economical for them to just buy one of the dirt cheap working phones on the second hand market. You would never bother to fix an iphone 5 for example when you can get another working one for almost free.

> The problem is a lot of the parts that tend to fail like a screen replacement or water damage to the main board cost as much in parts as the phone is worth.

The problem is a lot of the parts that tend to fail like a $part cost as much in parts as the $device is worth.

A general problem leading to too much stuff into garbage.

Anyone coming up with a beneficial solution to this general problem might just win themselves a Nobel Prize.

The 'problem' is that Apple forbids their suppliers from selling any parts to consumers or repairmen in order to charge exorbitant sums.

And if you do find alternative parts and offer repair services to the public they prosecute you and destroy your life

https://repair.eu/news/apple-crushes-one-man-repair-shop/

Putting that money into buying up surplus commercial systems and shipping them out to disadvantaged places could have been much, much better in terms of results. It wouldn't have been near as sexy a subject for feelgood reporting.

Once in a whole someone has to take on projects to try to explore the solution space and break out of local optima. It doesn't always work, but when it does, the gains are orders of magnitude. One example is the nascent reusable rocket industry vs. the existing space shuttle and converted ICBMs.

Told to shut up by whom?

I presume his parents or anyone he raised his concerns with. From personal experience, international aid seems to attract a distinct subset of rather narcissistic and myopic people who do it for their egos rather than to help people. Despite their rude and harsh demeanour, we just have to put up with them because many of them end up climbing the leadership ranks and become even bigger psychopaths.

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