Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

I would encourage you to forget about hardware and concentrate on the software and applications.

Based on my experiences (I work for an ISP but we have a "sister" company that's an MSP that provides IT services to, among others, several K-12 schools in such rural areas), most of these schools either 1) already have available hardware (iPads, Chromebooks) due to existing 1:1 programs or 2) have decided to not (yet) pursue that (usually because of financial reasons).

In the former case, they already have hardware and don't want to buy even more. In the latter, they simply don't have the money for it (it'll be an even harder sell if it's not "general purpose" and can only be used with your stuff). Even if you manage to get it under $50 per student, that's still a lot of money that they could likely spend elsewhere.

Develop your applications and concentrate on targeting the most popular platforms (iOS and Android) and forget about trying to sell them hardware they can't (easily) reuse. Definitely forget about cellular connectivity and stick to Wi-Fi instead.

Thank you jlgaddis ! Really, we don't try to be a hardware company, we just try to find a reasonable way to a child fo owning a device with internet access and 'reasonable' performance. Our freemium business model really didn't focus on such areas neither in hardware, if we found a hardware provider partner that offers affordable plans ( such as paying 5$ per month during a year instead of all), this will be great for us so we can focus only on software apps. In The zone that we target, they never used computers before, most use cellular phones or cheap smartphones but this is for parents not children.

Have you considered pre owned laptops from urban areas. You could try running a campaign if you haven't already.

I thought important thing in this setup is transparency. So if a particular user or teacher can not afford, you add them to a page. A donation can be old or pre owned laptop.

the problem with old equipment twofold; first, there's a lot more maintenance. Next? when you are dealing in cast-offs, you by necessity have a heterogeneous fleet of hardware.

(The market for obsolete server hardware is interesting because often you pay more if you want a whole bunch of the same thing)

If you have to pay someone to maintain the obsolete hardware, it's probably cheaper to just buy everyone new chromebooks or something.

On the other hand, If you can sell that as part of the program, teaching the kids to fix the hardware, that could work out really well. But the point is that there is a lot of labor involved in using a heterogeneous fleet of cast-off hardware; a lot more labor than in using a homogenous fleet of newer hardware.

It is, however, labor that I think you can teach kids how to do. Fixing a computer isn't any harder than fixing a car, and is probably a lot safer.

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