Nicholas Negroponte's $100 PC
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte has a plan to build a $100 PC for the developing world that'll make that new budget Mac mini seem grossly overpriced. Nick says that the PC, which is supposedly going to have a 14-inch color screen and run on Linux (what else?), has the backing of AMD (which is going to provide the chips—note that this is a different machine than the Personal Internet Communicator AMD announced late last year), as well as Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. Apparently they're all getting mixed up in a joint-venture to produce the PC, which will be sold directly to governments only (minimum order is 1 million units, with the Chinese ministry of education is first on the list). Tempted as we are to buy ten of these and rig 'em together, we can see why they don't want to pitch this as a consumer device. Given how expensive even a $100 PC would be for the poorest two billion people on the planet, we're guessing most people in the developing world, if they had to buy some piece of technology, would rather spend their money on a cellphone.
[Via GigaOm]
