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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

1 - olpc / Sugar isn't a Chromebook at all, it's a learning OS meant for builders first, consumers second

2 - olpc was as much about making computing hardware cheaply and as accessible as possible to communities that didn't have any access to reliable electricity, let alone computers. Hence the built in hand crank

3 - to my knowledge, olpc distributed globally, but hardly addressed US or EU countries at all, so I'm not sure what you mean by "is this normal in other countries."

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To be fair, OLPC was accidentally instrumental in making people buy cheap small laptops. The Eee PC netbook emerged very soon after the OLPC, and it was definitely responding to peoples' interest in the OLPC - particularly from the "Give one get one" program. The Eee PC became netbooks, which were eventually strangled to death by Chromebooks.

The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100 laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100 laptops."

The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was obscene, and it's a shame the market allowed that interest to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and computers are Google now.

That is indeed a fair point. I find it hard to fault OLPC for these dynamics however. OLPC had a real "hacker" mentality to it in the best senses of the word. It's easy to see the missteps in retrospect, but hard to see how they could have ended up anywhere else given the moment in time

Nit - the crank was a prototype but it didn't ship on any models, because it turned out to not work well, and it turns out that places where people can't afford much technology, people also don't have that much spare energy to spend on hand cranking things.

i thought the handcrank failed because the energy created was not enough, and turning a crank built into the laptop would create to much force that would break the laptop apart.

i don't see that people who can't afford technology would have any less spare energy than people who do.

My understanding was that it never shipped as more than a concept because it turns out to be very hard to build such a thing that's not trivially breakable (a bunch of public demos had failures like that) and doesn't damage the laptop when attached, since for all their durability compared to many older and modern laptops, they're cheap plastic.

I imagine if the company hadn't gone belly-up because the predicted demand didn't really materialize, they might have refined that further, but.

It might be kind of fascinating to revisit how powerful you could make such a device in this day and age of manufacturers having spent many more years trying to improve power/performance in small form factors, but I'm not sure anyone would professionally touch such an idea now, given how visibly it went belly-up...

As far as the human energy cost not mattering - have you ever tried cranking something with mechanical resistance for 6 minutes straight to get an hour of battery life? It's draining, even with practice.

Something interesting might have been something more like a bike pedal mechanism, since that's something a lot of humans have practice at doing without exhausting themselves, but that might still have problems with the amount of resistance required to turn it into electricity...

it never shipped as more than a concept because...

right, exactly.

As far as the human energy cost not mattering

i think you misread that, unless you are not responding to me. what i am saying is that the human energy of poor people is no different than the human energy of wealthy ones, so the argument that poor people in particular would not have the energy to use a hand crank is nonsense, because, as you rightly say, turning a handcrank is exhausting, but it is exhausting for everyone. (and i know that from experience. we used to mill our own flour with a handcrank)

bike pedal mechanisms for electricity have been spotted in some OLPC deployments, as far as i remember. but a laptop is not the only thing using electricity, so if pedal mechanisms are a good idea, i'd expect to see them more often. my impression is that they are only good as a last resort, when better options are not available.

The remark was that in places where you cannot get reliable power, you often have a more physically intense day to day, so the "cost" of exhausting yourself to power something is "higher" compared to the less physically intensive lifestyles of many people in environments with stable electricity available.

yes, but physical activity makes your body more energetic, thus capable of spending more energy. so the less physically intensive your average day is, the less energy you have to power a handcrank because your body didn't develop the capacity to expend that kind of energy. therefore i expect the end result to be the same.

Thanks for this...tbh I haven't actually followed the project since about 2008

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