Boston – Google Inc began selling basic laptop computers to schools at a price of $99, meeting a price point that prominent MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte famously held out in 2005 as key to bringing computing power to the masses.
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The Internet giant said on Monday that it will be offering the steep educational discount on Series 5 Chromebooks from Samsung Electronics Co through December 21. They typically retail for $399.
Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child Foundation failed to meet his ambitious target, which critics said would be impossible to meet when he set it. His XO laptop currently sell for about $200.
Still, he is widely credited with helping to launch the era of low-cost portable computing.
The creation of relatively low-cost laptops from his foundation pressured industry giants including Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc to develop inexpensive versions of their products such as the netbook.
Information on the program is available at (http://googleblog.blogspot.com)
But it’s not really a laptop. It just runs the Google Chrome browser and associated add-ons. There’s no Windows, Android, or any other operating system to speak of.