http://courageous.murch-sitaker.org/~kragen/electronics/
Unfortunately this is mostly on the web, since it includes lots of photos. Here's the basic text: I took apart some electronics with a retail price (here in Ecuador) of under US$10, in quantity 1, on the theory that things of this price are affordable to nearly the entire population of Ecuador, and most other developing countries. I took some photos and some notes. Here's a table briefly summarizing what I found. Most of the numbers are pretty approximate. [table omitted] The total cost of these eight devices was under US$45, a substantial sum when living in Ecuador, but a small budget for a research project. Why? I've seen access to information and communication technology change lives and societies during my lifetime, dramatically for the better. I think it's so important that no person or group should be able to restrict other people's ability to communicate or program --- that these are fundamental human rights. However, today, most of the world's people have not seen or experienced what I'm talking about, and can't effectively access these rights, even when there's no legal prohibition in their way. One reason for this is that they can't afford to own computers of their own, and for both technological and economic reasons, they don't have much freedom to program computers belonging to other people (e.g. in internet access centers.) Most of the computers in the world today are designed by and for first-world people: PCs, laptops, cellphones, etc., are designed by people in Shanghai, Finland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Seoul, the US, Germany, etc., and are primarily designed for the constraints and budgets of Japanese, US, and European markets. I suspect that if you designed a personal computer with the world population in mind, you'd come up with something different. There have been approaches along these lines already (Jhai, Simputer, OLPC) but most of them have failed, due to a wide variety of reasons. I spent a bunch of time reading price lists from electronics distributors, pondering the following question: is it possible to build a useful computer with a development toolchain, for a price most of the world can afford (under US$20, ideally under US$10), small enough to carry around, that can run off cheap batteries, powerful enough not only for a self-hosted software development environment, but also for reading and writing email, including a short-range wireless communication link for networking? I concluded that it was, with no new silicon. But I don't have much experience designing and building electronics, so I thought I should get a reality check from real retail market prices in a third-world country: what has already been built? Presumably any hidden costs of NRE, assembly, shipping, retail shrinkage, etc., will show up in the retail price --- although there's a risk that I'll get fooled by loss-leaders. Findings Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me, but it does: every single one of these devices was made in China, with the possible exception of the Sung Wei radio, which didn't say. The small watch said on the back, "Japan Quality. Made in China." I would have thought that at least some of the bottom end of the electronics market would be supplied from Indonesia, South Korea (the Sung Wei radio does have a Samsung chip in it), Thailand, Malaysia, or some place in South America (since I'm in South America), but apparently not. Both of the calculators are close copies of Casio models that cost two or three times as much. I was also surprised that every single one of these devices was built, apparently, for the US market. The labels and manuals are in English, and some bear FCC approval notices. I don't know where to look for electronics this cheap in the US, but they were easy to find here in Ecuador. It seems like there ought to be a substantial market in Spanish-speaking countries with similar levels of material prosperity; but of all of these devices, only the nice calculator had any labels in Spanish, although some others had some labeling in French or German, and several had the CE seal. I suspect that's why so many of them are children's toys or otherwise limited devices: not that it's impossible to build a more powerful machine for this price point, but that because more powerful computers are less interchangeable, the first-world customers of such more powerful devices aren't as price-sensitive as first-world buyers of children's toys, portable radios, pocket calculators. Most of them are robustly constructed, and some are unbelievably robust. It does seem that robust construction costs extra, though. Only one of these devices approaches the kind of computational power I think a personal computing device needs, and that I can bring to market --- the nice calculator. Acknowledgments Many thanks to my wife, Beatrice Murch, for her aesthetic feedback, for the use of her computer and digital camera for this project, for her technical assistance, and for her patience. Thanks to the Universidad T??cnica Particular de Loja for providing me free access to the internet while I was describing this work.
