I think their goal was interesting for the time, but its release coincided first with the whole 'netbook' craze which meant, all of a sudden, you could buy a regular laptop for $100-$200, rather than the maybe $700-$800 low-end laptop price that had prevailed before that, and then with smart phones becoming ubiquitous and dirt cheap all over the world.
One laptop per child is why there was a netbook craze!
They basically showed it was possible to get a machine at that lower price point and then capitalism and mass market manufacturing did the rest.
Is this so often the case innovation requires someone to prove what's possible and then going down the same path is much easier for those who come later.
One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries - even in some of the so-called "developed" ones.
I watched a video¹ today about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, and while the video focuses on the rebels' use of 3D-printed firearms, there was a smaller point about how a lot of Rohingya villages ended up entirely caught off-guard during the most recent wave of genocidal purging because news would travel too slow from village to village; as the Junta forces would descend upon one village, there was no effective way for that village to warn its neighbors.
First thing that popped into my head: "ain't this something OLPC and other mesh network attempts would've been able to address?"
A lot of mesh networking experiments, including that of OLPC, seem to have failed - but some have shown some recent success. Maybe it's time to have another go at deploying mesh networks to the masses at scale, learning from those failures and successes?
My understanding is that they just piggyback on the nearest Bluetooth-enabled Apple device, which then pings Apple's servers; non-Apple-specific equivalents like Tile work the same way (just with different host-device-level software and different centralized servers).
