The beta units were 600 euros, while the chipset is $87.
Meanwhile an Acer Aspire E 15 for $600 gives you a $297 CPU and $70 graphics card.
I guess there is some overhead because the beta was 10 units not a hundred thousand units, but still. You might as well get a Raspberry Pi and a portable screen and stick them in a box. It's half the price and you can use the components for other things after you get bored.
You can't expect a two-man company to win on every point against Acer. I don't think 900 euro is bad for a laptop, especially not one with an upgrade path.
Making your own Raspberry Pi laptop/portable is a fun project, but it's not really the same as making one that people can just buy, neither for the maker nor the owner. A community of hacks and mods can spring up around the standards set by such a project.
It doesn't look like those are available. But CPU chips are just compiled Verilog at this point, if you want sources for every last thing you'd have to move away from ARM entirely since it's a proprietary ISA. Maybe SiFive will release a fully open laptop sometime in the future.
Comments
The beta units were 600 euros, while the chipset is $87.
Meanwhile an Acer Aspire E 15 for $600 gives you a $297 CPU and $70 graphics card.
I guess there is some overhead because the beta was 10 units not a hundred thousand units, but still. You might as well get a Raspberry Pi and a portable screen and stick them in a box. It's half the price and you can use the components for other things after you get bored.
You can't expect a two-man company to win on every point against Acer. I don't think 900 euro is bad for a laptop, especially not one with an upgrade path.
Making your own Raspberry Pi laptop/portable is a fun project, but it's not really the same as making one that people can just buy, neither for the maker nor the owner. A community of hacks and mods can spring up around the standards set by such a project.
I really look forward to getting one.
Can you get the sources for the board for the Raspberry? Can you run it without blobs?
It doesn't look like those are available. But CPU chips are just compiled Verilog at this point, if you want sources for every last thing you'd have to move away from ARM entirely since it's a proprietary ISA. Maybe SiFive will release a fully open laptop sometime in the future.