News Release

The $100 Laptop is Coming: "IEEE-USA
Today's Engineer Online" Article

WASHINGTON (21 July 2006) — Some manufacturers Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen approached about producing and selling a laptop computer for $100 laughed at her. Despite this chiding and disbelief, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) chief technology officer has persevered, and the $100 laptop is on track to be shipped next spring.

Jepsen describes the OLPC program in "Working on the $100 Laptop" in the July issue of "IEEE-USA Today's Engineer Online."

OLPC is a non-profit association dedicated to researching and developing a low-cost laptop to serve as an educational tool for children in the developing world. The cheapest laptops on the market today typically sell for about $499, a price completely out of reach for most of the world's children and their parents. The $100 laptop has the potential to transform education in the world's poorest countries.

Jepsen writes that Billy Edwards, AMD's chief strategy officer "describes our design of the $100 laptop as the first fundamental revisit of personal computer architecture since IBM launched the PC in 1981. Twenty-five years, and now, for the first time, we're redesigning the whole architecture — hardware, software, display — and we're coming up with some remarkable inventions and innovations."

The $100 laptop, which will have online capability, will also have features that most typical laptops do not. These include instant on, three to four times the range of WiFi antennae, a hand crank to recharge the battery, one-tenth the power consumption, and a higher-resolution display.

"This is not a cost-reduced version of today's laptop," Jepsen writes. "It's an entirely new approach to the idea of a laptop."

To read the entire article, go to www.todaysengineer.org. To subscribe to "Today's Engineer Online," IEEE members can go to http://ewh.ieee.org/enotice/options.php?LN=IEEEUSA. Non-members can visit http://www.todaysengineer.org/emailupdates/index.html

IEEE-USA advances the public good and promotes the careers and public policy interests of more than 220,000 engineers, scientists and allied professionals who are U.S. members of the IEEE. IEEE-USA is part of the IEEE, the world's largest technical professional society with 360,000 members in 150 countries. See http://www.ieeeusa.org.

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Contact: Chris McManes
IEEE-USA Senior Public Relations Coordinator
Phone: + 1 202 530-8356
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Last Update:  15 May 2007
Staff Contact: Pender M. McCarter, p.mccarter@ieee.org