I'm glad to see the program being handled by Amazon this time around; hopefully that will prevent all of the distribution headaches that happened during the previous program.
The major issues last time were caused by a lack of communications between the packager (Brightstar), the biller (Paypal), the shipper (Fedex?), and the OLPC organization. There were problems at several stages in the order process and no easy communications route for the customer to follow to get them resolved, let alone determine the responsible party. With Amazon controlling the entire flow, it probably will go a lot better this time.
I dont understand why they dont offer "get one" too?
Wouldnt that increase the volumes driving the price down?
For as long as this project has been going on, especially with the original $100 laptop goal, I am surprised that the price has yet to diminish. I don't mean to be pessimistic about something as altruistic as this project is, but as a student right now I would really like to get involved with the project and purchase two, but $400 is still too much.
The original expectation was that OLPC would be selling 5 million laptops to national governments in its first year and hundreds of millions by now. Instead, it has sold hundreds of thousands of laptops. A 1000-fold difference in scale makes a large difference in price.