They're launching a laptop for $10? With 2GB of RAM? You can't even buy 2GB of RAM for that price. I really hope this is real, but when you put together the costs of a display, RAM, some sort of persistent storage, heck even the keyboard is going to run more than $1.
You could get the flash, ram, processor, and most of the peripheral ports integrated into a microcontroller package at well under $3 for the right volume, particularly if they were not component packaged but chips epoxied onto the motherboard. The motherboard and keyboard would probably be the same component (think pocket calculator membrane keys), and if there was a trackpad it might work similarly (otherwise use arrow keys for free).
In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges.
10kbps is obviously a tiny amount of bandwidth, especially per institution. This is clearly not enough for doing interactive browsing in a class. For this reason I suspect that the 2GB is actually flash, not DRAM. You couldn't keep a room full of 64k DRAM computers busy with 20-30% of a dialup modem.
At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down
Still it is quite unbelievable. If it was something built to browse internet alone with little RAM and processing power may be. But their claim and price doesn't match.
No markup - They don't need to make a profit or even subsidize employee wages
Their costs are local - Shipping and labour for example are going to be extremely low in the local economy
Indian has done similar projects before such as generic pharmaceuticals which they sell to other 2nd and 3rd world companies.
