Someone is subsidizing that price. Either there are ads for the chillren on that pad, or the government is expected to pay for it in some way. With that screen and the internal parts, it costs a minimum of $220 to produce.
Publishers could have a problem if this approach takes off.
They revise textbooks every few years and students have to shell out big money...
“Someone is subsidizing that price.... it costs a minimum of $220 to produce.”
I’m not arguing, but where are you getting that $220 number?
I know nothing of the Armada chipset, but if it is a complete SoC with only memory required, I can see how you’d make a tiny profit on something like this. Keep in mind that what Marvell would charge itself for its own SoC is next to nothing.
I wouldn’t expect the iPad’s resolution or refresh rate, but you can drive the cost of LCDs down if you reduce their max. frame rate. Most video is acceptable at 30FPS.
I just don’t understand where you are getting your $220 number, that’s all :-)!
Considering textbook prices, it could be subsidized with a subscription to updated textbooks.
But, any device aimed at a school age audience would have to be built like a tank to survive. Lock two ten year olds in a room with two supposedly unbreakable computers for ten minutes and they will manage to lose one and break the other.
Marvell is the manufacturer. Apple is a middleman.
An iPad costs around 240 to produce according to teardowns, that in no way means you can’t produce cheaper.
Or use the Cell Phone/Video game model, where losses are part of the hardware but more than made up for by service or software sales over lifetime.
Subsidizing doesn’t always come from external advertising.
/bingo
In addition, the $100 price for the “one laptop per child” crap conceived and championed by some know-nothing public scold wasn’t even close when the project finally came to fruition. You may remember the ad campaign, buy two, give one away?
Kids in the third world need two things, primarily — one is, the extermination of Islam, the other is a reliable supply of clean drinking water.