olpc

For Mary Lou Jepsen, getting an MRI is not unlike getting a massage—a relaxing ritual, a rare slice of time when no work can possibly be done. I’m accompanying Jepsen to her doctor’s appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital because it’s the only few hours she can fit me in. She’s in Boston for three days, in between trips to her Sausalito, California, houseboat and her apartment in Taipei, Taiwan, and she’s booked back-to-back with appointments. Yesterday she had a meeting with the team at One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit she helped create and with which she still collaborates on new computer designs. Today she’s talking with her doctor about the medicine she needs to take to stay alive, after a tumor nearly killed her 10 years ago. Tomorrow she will appear at the Boston Book Festival in a debate about the future of reading, along with top executives from Sony and Google.

While Jepsen gets her brain scanned, I sit in the waiting room and guard the tote bag that contains the reason her life is so frenzied: a 10-inch slab of glass that, she says, merges the best of computers and e-readers into a single screen.

The XO laptop is back with a new look and a new design, at least in theory. Nicholas Negroponte unveiled photos of the upcoming XO-2 device this week, with an announcement that the revamped computer would be ready for delivery by 2010 and carry a price tag of $75. Gone is the green plastic keyboard, replaced instead with a second touch screen. The device can be opened to function like an electronic book, or it can be rotated to a more traditional laptop configuration, with the new screen assuming the role of virtual keyboard.

The ambitious One Laptop per Child program continues to flounder. OLPC's cornerstone XO laptop, which was widely lauded when it was functionally revealed in 2006, has still failed to reach its original price point of $100. Currently selling for $188 and achieving a narrower distribution than initially intended, the machine has yet again run into problems. Last week, Walter Bender, long the second in command on the project, left the group apparently out of disagreement over a significant internal shift in goals and direction.

Intel rolled out its new low-cost laptop model yesterday, and the machines will boast bigger, 9-inch screens, 30 GB of storage and integrated Web cameras. These new Classmate PCs, which will go on sale in April for somewhere between $300 and $500, are the second iteration of Intel's answer to the One Laptop Per Child organization's cheap laptop, the XO.

Three years ago, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) was a shining example of innovative, nonprofit goodness. It had a bold humanitarian mission to develop and send $100 laptops to children in developing nations, and its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, had ambitions of distributing up to 10 million units by the beginning of 2007. The XO laptop won widespread acclaim and plenty of accolades (including a 2006 Best of Whats New Grand Award in this magazine).