'$100 laptop' sparks war of words
Chip-maker Intel "should be ashamed of itself" for efforts to undermine the $100 laptop initiative, according to its founder Nicholas Negroponte. — He accused Intel of selling its own cut-price laptop - the Classmate - below cost to drive him out of markets.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nicholas Negroponte's public attack marks an escalation in the collision between the One Laptop Per Child project and the world's largest chipmaker. The pickup across CNET, CBS News and ZDNet's Between the Lines within a day shows how much attention the feud commands: OLPC's give-one-get-one idealism has run headlong into Intel's commercial low-cost push.
The charge at the center of the story — that Intel sells its Classmate below cost to squeeze OLPC out of education markets — is Negroponte's unconfirmed accusation, not an established fact. What is documented is Intel's aggressive 2007 product cadence, from the Bearlake chipset launch at CeBIT in March to a new ultra-mobile PC platform unveiled in Beijing in April, which most observers at the time judged to serve no readily discernible need. A vendor hunting for new volume markets has clear motive to contest the education segment.
First-order effects
- OLPC's government negotiations become harder and easier at once: every education ministry evaluating the XO laptop can now pit Intel's Classmate against it for a lower quote, turning procurement meetings into bidding contests.
Second-order effects
- Intel must answer the 'ashamed of itself' framing publicly rather than ignore it, because the accusation targets its brand among the development agencies and donors whose goodwill both sides need for school deployments.
Third-order effects
- If below-cost competition in emerging-market education hardware becomes standard practice, the segment consolidates around whichever vendor can subsidize losses longest — shifting 'laptops for children' from philanthropic mission to a price war between silicon incumbents.
The trend: Low-cost computing for developing-world schools is hardening into a contested commercial market where chip giants and nonprofit-backed projects fight over the same buyers.