Details About Raspberry Pi Foundation's $25 PC

First time accepted submitter salcan writes "There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We've seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November this year. Eben Upton, director of the foundation, recently gave a talk at Bletchley Park regarding Educating Programmers, which focused on the thinking behind the $25 PC."

Comments

Cost of a textbook?

[Mensa Babe]

"During the talk Eben explains that the $25 price point was decided upon because it is the cost of a textbook so it made sense. Students buy textbooks, so a PC priced the same is a natural fit and hopefully an easy purchase for them, their parents, or their school." [emphasis added]

Students also buy milk but it doesn't mean that therefore computers should cost the same as milk. I don't think that a real computer should be worth the same as one textbook because of the fact that many more than one textbook could be downloaded on it and thus much more money could be saved by children if that is really a fully functional general purpose computer that the story makes us believe it is. It is worth noting that unlike the $100 laptops, this computer is not complete. It doesn't have a keyboard, it doesn't have a display. It has a HDMI port - yes, that will help poor children who can't afford a computer more expensive than $25. Also, are they going to carry a plasma TV around to use it? Quite frankly I think that it would be a much better idea to offer a Fuzebox kit from Adafruit - a do-it-yourself retro video console kit with open source software and open source hardware - or even an Arduino kit with TV output. In this case however all we have seen so far is a promise to deliver a $25 embedded board which is nice but it can hardly be called a computer, and especially not a computer that poor children in developing countries would need the most. We don't even know how much RAM will it have, whether it will run Linux or even if it will be useful for anything more serious than hacking a simple embedded Linux project. Don't get me wrong, I think that embedded projects are a great way for children to learn how computers work. But this is not a substitute for a laptop, notebook or netbook that those children need. Even a tablet would be a better idea but we all know this is not going to happen because apparently taking a keyboard out of a netbook makes it somehow ten times more expensive. We need a cheap laptop, a fully functional, self contained computer that children can use instead of textbooks, not as just one of them.