‘$100 laptop’ cost rises to $175, for now

The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine, for now, costs $175 and that it would be able to run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system in addition to its home-grown, open-source interface.

Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, said “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”

That’s partly because at least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white XO computers -- Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya. The project needs orders for 3 million machines for its manufacturing and distribution effort to get rolling.

Negroponte expects mass production to begin by October, and he said many other countries had been inquiring about taking part in the project.

Negroponte’s team has always stressed that $100 was a long-term target for the machines, but recently publicized figures had put it in the $150 range.

Negroponte says the cost should drop about 25% a year as the project unfolds.