How important have environmental and economic questions been in the development of the laptop?
Economics: the bottom line is if we couldn’t get the price down to something reasonable, then it would be just out of reach. It has got to be within reach of these countries and children. Giving one laptop per child in the developed world is really a matter of choice; it is not a matter of whether the capacity is there. But doing it in the developing world, the numbers really matter. There is a natural synergy between what we are trying to do and making this thing environmentally-friendly; for example, bringing the power consumption down because we have to make it within reach of people living off the grid. This turns out to be a really good thing to do environmentally because you are using less power. You are able to use renewable and sustainable power sources. Printing and distributing books is, in the long run, more of a problem environmentally than giving out the laptops so it turns out we have a bit of an environmental windfall. We have been very conscious that the laptop does not
