It's been hit by a few delays, but the OLPC XO has finally gone into mass production. According to Mass High Tech, that long-awaited event officially got underway yesterday morning at Quanta Computer's brand new manufacturing facility in Changshu, China, which is just a two-hour jaunt northwest of Shanghai (in case anyone's planning on doing some sight-seeing). While that's a little later than the original estimate of October that Quanta gave when it first began to gear up for production way back in July, it's actually a few days earlier than the company's most recent indication of a start date, which it had pegged as November 12th just last month. Now, let's just hope this begins the road down to something closer to that mythical $100 price tag.

According to InfoWorld (via Yahoo News), contract manufacturer Quanta Computer has confirmed that they've received orders for one million of the long-awaited OLPC XO laptops anticipated by children and geeks alike, with orders expected to further increase throughout the rest of the year. If that goes as planned, Quanta says it could ship as many as ten million of the laptops before year's end, which would go a long way towards getting the little green laptop down to its intended $100 price point, possibly even ahead of the 2008 target date for a price drop. Quanta also revealed that NickNeg is apparently not the only one obsessed with the project, with company president Michael Wang saying "this is our chairman's pet project, it's his life." Not that there's anything wrong with being obsessed with a gadget, of course.

Last we heard from NickNeg's OLPC, the organization had just signed a big deal to sell 1.2 million laptops to Libya. Today, we've just found out that Quanta Computer is readying to start a "test production" of those laptops, with sample units to be available starting in November. According to DigiTimes, Quanta said it expects to start making these cute green machines by early 2007 and will have shipped 10 million units by early 2008. Fanfare aside, DigiTimes also cited unnamed "sources within Taiwan's IC design sector" that there are doubts as to what countries are going to actually buy these machines, with only one country (Libya) having confirmed an order so far. Or as OLPC News put it: "Would Libya be your first round draft pick if you were thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about helping developing world children through information and communication technologies?" Touché, OLPC News. Your response, OLPC?

[Via OLPC News]