Nicholas Negroponte and his team of researchers at MIT are gearing up to unveil the prototype of a new low-cost laptop at the UN World Summit on the Information Society.
The laptop was created, in part, to fulfill one of the team’s goals of a world where “everyone, everywhere” is able to participate in technology.
So far Negroponte and his team have managed to pare down production costs to $130 per unit but they’re aiming for (and believe they’ll reach) an eventual cost of $100 per laptop.
Get a look at the computer and its non-traditional exterior (green and has what appears to be some sort of hand crank on the side) in this article in the Christian Science Monitor.
A number of businesses and universities are contributing to the project. Apple tried to pitch in by offering free copies of OS X on all the machines but was rejected by MIT because the operating system isn’t open source. Maybe they should have offered free iPods.
