Negroponte’s latest plan to save the world is a computer that would exceed anyone else’s expectation for performance while costing less than anyone else’s forecast of what’s possible. By 2012 he aims to build a touchscreen tablet PC for poor schoolchildren that uses less power than a modest lightbulb and is unbreakable, waterproof and half the thickness of an iPhone. The projected price: $75.
“Essentially, we want it to be a single sheet of plastic. No holes, no moving parts,” says Negroponte, director of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit and founder of MIT’s Media Lab. “We want it to be so simple that it hardly has a design.”