The latest cool tool you can't have: Laptops so cheap they're disposable

0 Comments | USA TODAY, February, 2007 | by Kevin Maney

Want to buy one of the most innovative, power-efficient, inexpensive laptops made today?

You can't. Right now, they're only for poor kids in developing countries.

Which is all very nice, in a warm, corporate-philanthropy kind of way. A number of tech companies -- including Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child -- want to help kids in places such as the African sub-Sahara rise from poverty by arming them with laptops that cost less than dinner for two at Morton's Steak House.

But these laptops should be sold in Wal-Marts in Tuscaloosa or RadioShacks in Walla Walla -- or in Safeway checkout aisles everywhere, maybe next to the News of the World displays.

Intel has developed an inexpensive laptop called the...