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Raspberry Pi Has Gone To Manufacturing
alecclews writes "After weeks of waiting, the Raspberry Pi foundation, who are creating a $25 computer to bootstrap computing education, has flipped the switch on manufacturing. They had wanted to build the board in the UK but it turns out to be uneconomic."
To Eben, Liz and crew: Congratulations! Looking forward to watching you revolutionize computer education!
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I was checking this out last night and I'm actually quite excited for one to come out. I've been in the industry for years now but more on the superuser side. It'll be a really fun chance to actually have a computer where I have to learn some electronics and programming to really get the most use out of it... kind of like jumping into the deep end of the pond. It'll be my main home computer.
I usually recommend a USB flash drive for my students in my Unix course (taught on Macs at the school), and leave it up to them which Linux distro to run at home from the Flash drive. With prices this low, I could almost make it a requirement for the course. I'll hold off to see how they fare though.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Government taxes have little to do with it. When most of the manufacturing was moved to Asia, skill sets started to atrophy. It is very hard to find skilled manufacturing managers, engineers, or even operators in the West because there are few places to build up those skills. Likewise, when volumes are low, it's hard to justify the cutting edge machinery that allows for faster turn times and lower costs.
When the corporate CEOs decided to line their pockets by offshoring, they didn't just screw over the people they fired. They made it damn near impossible to ever bring those jobs back. Things will continue to get worse until the Asian factories realize that they can just take the schematics and make and sell the latest iPad as their own, and there won't be a damn thing we can do about it, since we will be completely unable to manufacture it (or anything else) in the West. Even if we were to eliminate all minimum wage and pollution laws, we wouldn't be able to compete, because we've been training them and buying their high tech tools for decades. But the CEOs who made that choice for us will have already retired with their hundreds of millions of dollars, so what do they care?
And then the taxing part is plain and simply dumb. You can't control corporations, but that the government actively deters local production? That's like shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why it hurts.
It's likely a throwback to a (failed) attempt to bolster UK component manufacture that's now backfiring on us.
If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all.
Tax and duty are two different things. Anyone care to explain the actual situation there? Sounds like they're confused, at least.
Is there a specific semiconductor duty that doesn't apply to finished goods? (not sure that a board like this would count as 'finished' anyway, for duty purpose)
If they're bitching about VAT, I don't see how that would be any different, completed unit or not.
The only difference I can see is more margin on Chinese produced version, barring there is no duty on semis, as mentioned above... Which any idiot would well know, by walking into a wal-mart.
If you're looking for x86 SOC, Intel's new Medfield might be your best bet. Medfield article
If you were to give these the Raspberry Pi treatment...let's say a Pi board's cost is 1/2 cpu, 1/2 everything else. So the everything else is about...rounding up....let's say about 15 bucks. So add about $15 to whatever Intel charges for Medfield and you'd have your x86 Raspberry Pi.
It will be more expensive than $25 total, because...well...Intel is involved. No way a Medfield chipset will sell for ten bucks. But it would still be cheap and let you run Wine or other groovy stuff on a dinky cheap board.
It might be close though. I found this atom board for $57, and that's a full motherboard with a lot of expensive slots and heat sinks and the like. The actual Atom chip probably isn't more than $15-20 bucks. If Medfield is in this ballpark you could still be pretty cheap.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I can understand higher costs; the West won't accept salaries below a certain threshold, there's unions, and I entirely respect that. However, the schedule problem is ridiculous.
Yet not unusual. Last year I had some specialized paper rolls made for an obsolete printer. I talked to about 10 US firms. Some didn't want to make up 500 rolls, several didn't return phone calls and emails, one produced a low-quality sample, and one produced a good sample but quoted $10 a roll. That's in an industry, paper converting, which is in a severe recession.
Then I tried looking on Alibaba, the search engine for offshort manufacturing. I found a company in Fujian, China, which asked for a $100 deposit to make two sample rolls. The samples were promptly delivered and worked. Then I ordered 500 rolls, at $1 each, which were again delivered promptly, although the shipping cost more than the paper.
The firm in Fujian answered E-mails consistently and with useful answers within 24 hours, something few US companies seem to be able to do any more.
Install, leave it someplace and forget it. Do Anonymous a favor and place random stealth TOR exit nodes the world over with bifferboard and the like.