Intel has developed what it calls the “ClassMate PC” it intends to sell for $400 per unit in response to the $150 OLPC and will be evaluating it in Brazil.
The ultraportable will house:
The ultraportable will house an (unspecified) Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, 1GB of NAND goodness, and a 6-cell Li-ion battery.
It’ll likely run an embedded version of Windows. The OLPC will have much the same hardware but will run Linux. Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: “We declined because it’s not open source.†Therefore Linux was chosen.
It’s annoying though, considering Apple did this in 1997 – a decade ago!
Imagine what they could do now?