The economies of scale resulting in increases in production and the effect of searing competition has hammered down laptop pricing year after year. You can now purchase an adequately-specified machine for around £300, and it will run through most mundane tasks without bother.
Whilst £300 is considered cheap for a laptop in the UK, it's still a significant financial obstacle imposed on educational authorities looking to purchase notebooks for children in the developing world.
Intel, through its World Ahead program, has designed the ruggerdised Classmate PC, a fixed-spec subnotebook with a current purchase price of around £100 (sans Windows). We saw it loaded with Windows XP, run on a per-specification 2GiB NAND flash memory USB stick, and can report that the Celeron-powered system is surprisingly nippy when navigating through Windows. Deployment has already started in Asia, by the way.
