This blows my mind. I know, it's much more incremental than it is revolutionary, but I think the form factor achieves a much greater degree of access for many people than a typical Pi whose bare hardware may be a lot more intimidating. Now, it's "just" a computer, which happens to expose a 40-pin connector for the standard Pi hardware fun. And unlike other options you might find, this has the massive built-in community that comes with Pi
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
I don't know if this will quite have that level of impact, but I see the potential, especially now with remote learning: My kids are on a hybrid schedule. I'm fortunate to be able to provide them their necessary computing resources. Not everyone can: The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
I'm also old enough to remember when you'd be hard pressed to find a desktop computer for under $1000, perhaps $1500 adjusted for inflation. One for $70-$100 really just hammers home how far we've come.
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
That's a wonderful observation. The form factor is as clever as it is logical. Stuff like this makes me really optimistic for the future of Raspberry Pi (and widespread computing!).
It's one of those designs where you kind of go "ah yes, I thought that would be a good idea". But before you saw it you might never have planned it in your head exactly the way it is. The iPod was like that for me, with its scrolling click wheel.
Like getting to the platonic form of a specific type of device.
The Pi 400 is the completion of the idea of an educational computer for kids, IMO. It's not going to compete with a Mac mini or anything like that, and the keyboard is likely not going to be anyone's top choice for a 'professional' keyboard. But it's good enough in all the right ways as a general purpose computer.
The one weird thing to me is their mouse placement decision. Their promo photos and videos show it on the left side because of the most convenient usb port. I have never actually seen a left-placed mouse in the wild. Having it all look so clean and organized in the promo is a bit disingenuous.
In reality, the mouse will be on the right, and the cable will have to cross over top of all cables except the ethernet and usbc power. For such a beautiful form factor, it will look like a mess.
The funny thing is that all of the lefties I know just adapted to the right-side mouse (likely just because that is how it was setup at school/office).
While yes, the BT mouse is going to be the better option, they're pushing the kit-included mouse.
Me too. Due to some issues with right hand I retrained myself to use mouse with my left hand. Now I can use mouse by both hands, and in both button orientations.
Switching is easier than most people imagine, IMHO. I started to feel the beginnings of an RSI and went from right to left for half a year or so, no problems.
You basically just convinced me that I should be training my left hand to use my mouse. In all cases except precision work (eg graphic design) it should be doable.
Side note, but if you actually do graphic design, get a digitizer/gtaphic pen tablet, it is simply "another world" when compared to mouse, nowadays even an el-cheapo one ( i.e. something in the 40-60 US$ range)is good enough for non-professional use.
Actually this has little to do with being left-handed, it depends on other factors.
I am right handed and use the mouse with the left, so that I have my right hand "free" to use a pen or the (right side) numeric keypad when crunching numbers.
And I do not (as many left-handers do) "invert" the miue buttons, maybe I am strange/an exception.
The keyboard comes with Bluetooth 5.0; maybe the promo would look a bit cleaner with a bluetooth mouse, or at least a 2.4GHz wireless mouse and dongle.
It's a laptop minus the screen... that's all it amounts to. It's a keyboard with the proc and memory underneath it. I don't understand how any of this is revolutionary or special. Hell, it doesn't even have a battery.
I think the price alone makes it revolutionary. Laptops aren't $100 brand new and if it were what would that screen look like? Most people who would benefit from this price probably have a TV they can connect it to.
Also, screens last a long time, but it's the computers themselves that need continual ugrading. Case in point: we have a Dell screen from 18 year ago. The Dell desktop long since became obsolete.
So this makes a lot of sense economically, especially for cash-strapped organizations like schools that have to manage large fleets of machines.
Stuff that isn't touched and lasts long (screens) don't get replaced. Stuff that is touched (and likely to wear out over time) like keyboards or gets out of date due to Moore's Law (computer) is fused into one package, so there are fewer cables to worry about getting unplugged, worn out, etc.
That's fair, but there's another problem. It's hard enough to find a regular educator that's qualified to teach kids about computers on a Windows or Apple. Linux is going to be easier?
The education sector has already bought into Chromebooks, which means that most in-class technology solutions are going to target the browser. The only thing anyone will need to learn to move between OSes is: how do I turn it on, where's the button to launch the browser, how do I turn it off. Everything else will already be familiar.
As a British person we tend to tell everyone we do that and people believe it. However it’s not necessarily true. We produced a ridiculously large amount of crap to the point we nearly killed our manufacturing industry.
If there’s anything to aspire to its Hewlett Packard’s test and measurement and computing offerings between 1960 and 1990.
I've still got a 1971 MGB. Apart from problems with the electrics - batteries go flat in winter, it's pretty easy to fix most things by hitting it with a hammer.
Perhaps that was the case with e.g. vintage sports cars from the 50s and 60s. But I don't think the British manufacturing industry has been doing well ever since. I would love to be wrong, though.
> The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into, or even a proper desk to have a desktop computer set up on? Plus they'll need a separate webcam (and I'm guessing finding one that just works out of the box on Raspbian without fiddling around with drivers and such could be non-trivial). This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a $200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly more accessible.
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning than a laptop?
2) Webcam isn't strictly necessary: You'll be able to "see" your teacher, type in chat, virtually raise your hand, etc.
3) This enables more advanced STEM (The "T" portion, really) not because it's a desktop but because of the built-in 40-pin connector opening it up to the massive catalog of projects that exist for the Pi platform already.
4) Perfect is the enemy of the good: You're complaining this isn't a perfect solution for those lacking resources. It's not. But it is significantly better than nothing, or a phone with a 5" screen and no keyboard.
First peripheral I would sell is an add on breadboard station with lots of good sensors, lights, input controls, motor drivers and such that is buffered to prevent damage and start producing education kits.
It's also Linux based on a properly supported distro that is maintained specifically for the rpi. You can do real hacking, not "try to get this to run" hacking.
Seriously. That counts for a whole lot. Frankly, that was one of the great things about the old 8-bit computers. They were constant in some ways. You could turn them on. And then go.
What we've got here is something a lot like that. But it has a lot more power connectivity. All the things the simple machines don't have. But it's all still pretty lean too. I'm excited.
The PoE hat - at least the existing one as we know it - won't work for the 400. Besides the 40pin header it also uses another 2x2 header behind the magjack, which is where it receives the input from the ethernet jack.
Oddly, this board spots a separate ethernet transformer which does support PoE, but there's no circuity to tap that, and nowhere to add it. Which begs for a modification, but seems like missed opportunity.
Oh totally. And I can see why they'd want to keep the component count down. Their regular keyboard is $17, and the 4GB pi4 is $55. So if you just duct-taped the pi to the keyboard, you'd already be $2 (plus tape) over the RRP of the 400.
The bit I don't get is why use an ethernet transformer at all, especially if they're not reaping the benefit from it.
Agreed that it’s a missed opportunity but a Pi with a GPIO hat attached and receiving power over PoE and in hand of a kid doesn’t sound particularly great
Yes, that's the sort of rule a school district makes once there's a minimum standard of technology access. I'm talking about school districts with large numbers of kids without those resources.
I imagine if I were a kid now-a-days, but with the same hobbies I had when I was a kid for real i'd probably be deep-faking a wobbling face image pretty fast.
In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV. The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.
>In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV.
That was a fair assertion 1997. Nowadays you will easily find a bunch of computers too.
>The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.
$100 isn't cheap when you're poor.
A poor family that has any sense certainly won't buy brand-new hardware.
When you have to save money, you buy second-hand, which will allow you to buy a fairly modern PC with a magnitude more power than that raspberry PI at half the price.
For instance I could pick this computer up for 1 euro simply because someone wants to get rid of it:
I meant if they somehow got ahold of one (community program, kind person from across town, local school getting rid of them, etc.). The discussion was more about whether a child in a poor family who gets one can actually use it without any extra hardware, not how affordable $100 is to a family in poverty.
Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids, much less the $100 it costs.
Right, the point is not that poor families can afford a $100 computer, rather that the poor family's school can buy more $100 computers to hand out than they can $200 Chromebooks or $400 iPads.
> Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids.
You're absolutely right, and that's why the pi foundation includes schools as a target market. Schools deliver the greatest, and certainly the most equally distributed, value, and cheap computers mean more money to spend on that brain space.
No the parent, but I did this a bunch as we grew up poor. I got an oooooold IBM PS2 notebook with 6 Windows 3.1.2 floppies from the school IT discard pile. My friends and I also created the cheapest PC we could. It was a cardboard box with a small box fan and then all the Pentium 4 guts duct taped inside.
Sure, but for a sense of scale about how badly wrong things can go even in “rich” countries like England, 17% of state educated kids get free school meals because food is too expensive: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54692880
I thought "BBC Micro". (We had two of them at school when I was about 12. The 4 AppleIIs were always in demand with a queue of people waiting to play games, there was almost _always_ one of the BBC Micros to play with if you wanted to type in Basic code...)
The reason that the old '80s microcomputers were often plugged into TVs was that monitors were too expensive. Sharing the TV with every other device and person in the house was a necessary evil. TV-hogging is probably about as problematic now as it was then, while displays are much less expensive. So including a screen makes much more sense for a low-cost access-to-computing device these days.
I am not. In the developed world there's comparatively little chance that a school district or national education system could afford about $100 per head for a rollout of RPi 400s but not the say $240 or so per head (being pretty conservative) for a rollout of clamshell devices instead. Especially since you'll make some of that $140 back just by avoiding the technical support costs of helping families get the computers working with a zoo of BYOD HDMI TVs. Meanwhile in the developing world the assumption that everyone has at least one HDMI HDTV at home goes out the window. The original comment mentioned a supply issue with Chromebooks, but it seems unlikely that something like the RPi 400 is going to be much more secure against supply disruptions than a clamshell laptop.
An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.
And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, ask friends/family, you might get by. That's not a scalable solution for 1,000 kids in my school district that lack resources, much less the thousands more in surrounding districts. As with many technical problems, scaling is a challenge, not the single one-off solution.
> An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.
that's an entirely different argument, which I agree with you on. the original argument was that it's more likely a spare keyboard is lying around than a comparatively expensive monitor (which is more prone to being repurposed)
> mouse, .. HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card
these would still be required anyway, they're not included in the price
That's a pretty big exaggeration considering the 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B typically sells for $55-60. This adds a keyboard and case for $10-15 on top of that.
yes, it's a great price for a great piece of kit, don't get me wrong. but if the price is still an issue (as implied by free monitor), it shouldn't be a big exaggeration to expect to find a second hand Pi4 for $40-50
Monitors last much longer than their desirability these days, there are hundreds of thousands of old clunky Dells just sitting around.
It does call for a bit of scrounging, but an acceptable used monitor should be twenty bucks or free. Including a screen is optimizing for pessimism: the best you could do is something useless for the majority, and only as good/cheap as the minority could get a new one for.
In this particular moment, it might not be so bad for many use cases -- school hours are usually times when people are working anyway, so it isn't as if parents will be sitting around watching TV. Plus, it isn't like the goal here is just to goof off and play games, the kid is 1) learning 2) distracted. Seems like a pretty good tradeoff.
Broadcast TV-watching may be going down to a large extent (and even Cable TV), but even some of the poorer families can get their hands on an old Wii, Xbox 360, or the like from a Goodwill.
How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into
You just need a television. In a single household it wouldn't even necessarily need to be an extra television, unless it's some kind of truly abusive household where the kid's not allowed to pre-empt the family TV to attend school.
Of course, in a multi-kid household, yes - one screen per kid would be needed.
plus they'll need a separate webcam
Yes. Though, I'd be shocked if drivers were much of a hassle.
This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a
$200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly
more accessible.
Surely, but is the extra money more accessible?
And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning
than a laptop?
It's not the form factor. It's the OS. A fully-open OS, versus a locked-down OS.
Of course, whether or not this matters depends on the kid and the curriculum. If all the kid's doing is some web-based online curriculum whose needs are perfectly serviced by a Chromebook, then yeah - an RPi device isn't magically going to grant them magical STEM learning powers by osmosis.
> It's not the form factor. It's the OS. A fully-open OS, versus a locked-down OS.
Raspberry Pi 400 is what ChromeOS/Chromebooks could have been if Google cared about making computing empower people, rather than seeing it as a tool to manipulate them through adverts.
Oddly I was at Goodwill and picked up a RCA tv with an HDMI input for $20. It is only 18", but will do for the Pi 400 I grabbed today. Cheap used and still useful monitors are out there.
The pi lets you work without google spying on you. That’s why I want this as an alternative to a Chromebook. My kids can learn computing without feeding data to google.
I also really hope the Pi desktop PC succeeds as an alternative to ChromeOS.
I've been appalled by wide adoption among schoolkids of Chromebooks. Google promises not to build profiles of kids, but they are still capturing all their online and OS behaviour. The volumes of data captured are unimaginably large.
Pushback and scrutiny of ChromeOS is practically zero in tech circles. In fact it's quite the opposite, as discussed by some in this thread: there's excitement about the thought of porting ChromeOS to Pi.
They're poor, not desert nomads. Monitors and desks can easily be found for reasonable prices. Lots of people have random desks and old computer monitors sitting around.
Even for non-STEM students, the Pi setup seems fairly accessible.
From a quick online search, I could find monitors for $30 - $50 and webcams $20 - $30 which is pretty price competitive with a $200 - $300 Chromebook. The Pi community would help with any driver installation issues, and the Pi setup seems powered up enough to run Zoom with no issues.
Though I do see even cheaper Chromebooks in the same price range, so I wonder why / how districts are not able to provide these to students.
> Component shortages continue to disrupt Acer's Chromebook shipments, which can fulfill only 30% of customer orders, with shipments for the remainders having to be deferred, according to the company.
Ah still? Interesting. Maybe supply is geographically dependent, as I'm seeing Chromebook availability in Walmart / Amazon / directly from Acer. The sub-$200 laptops are mostly used or renewed though, so maybe school districts are more hesitant to purchase those.
They're available around me like that too, but not in sufficient quantities. If my district tried to buy 1,000 from Walmart, they wouldn't be able to. They're trickling in from suppliers slowly. It's also difficult to do a dozen of one type, 50 of another model, etc. The district needs to support these, and the more models there are the bigger the burden of support, different OS versions and levels of support/updates from the manufacturer. So, not a first choice, but it's still better than nothing. If they managed to get 200 more kids learning then it would be worth it.
Most people’s TVs at this point are basically a 1080 monitor hooked up to a computer (cable box) so I don’t see this as a big challenge. If a monitor is needed they are quite inexpensive at this point compared to what they used to cost.
The issue is that the Pi uses a relatively uncommon port (mini-HDMI) for their devices, and while the “Christmas Morning” kit that they’re selling includes the correct cable, it would’ve been nice if this larger device upgraded to use the far more common full-sized HDMI port. This way, they could’ve used a cable they likely already had available instead of needing something special or keeping track of a new cable.
Yes! This was such a terrible decision. At a first approximation, 0% of users will use two monitors. Including two HDMI ports on the board was a marketing gimmick ("look ma! two 4K monitors!"), which forced us all into a world of dongles and non-typical cables.
And HDMI itself isn’t a great choice if you’re hoping to let people use old monitors.
I have an old one with DVI and VGA, so I have a DVI-HDMI dongle and HDMI-HDMI mini cable and my first dongle didn’t work because the form factor of the monitor case didn’t allow it to fit. Quite a pain.
Of course DVI would rule out old TVs, so I don’t know what the “best” choice is, if there is one.
Is cable that common? Assuming you mean cable tv, it seems that at peak it was only just over half of all homes that subscribed and is falling. Presumably this is due to Netflix et al. However wiki numbers stop a few years back.
The point about it being hooked up to a cable box isn't particularly relevant unless you're only watching OTA digital TV all your media comes from what can be roughly described as a computer attached to a monitor. And even if you are just watching digital OTA TV any relatively modern TV will have an HDMI port.
Even without cable boxes, basically every TV has an input you can plug something into, even if you've got one of the extremely old ones you can get an adapter.
Oh, I don't know if it takes a lot of imagination to see how a desktop like this one enables more advanced stem learning. The I/O ports, low form factor for portability, the raspbian ecosystem and so on.
Think about scalability. We need a solution for more than just one person. We need a solution for 1,000 kids in my town, 5,000 in surrounding districts, and I have no idea how many state-wide. How many such laptops can you find? How much effort will it take to source a dozen here, and dozen there, from hundreds of different sources? Repurposing old hardware only works at a small scale. If there were 50 kids in the school district, the district could put out calls to other families who might have old hardware. That doesn't scale to thousands of students.
These are resources restricted households as well: $200-$250 represents a significant increase over $100.
This is a really great argument. While you can find used computers of all kind for $100, there is no guarantee what you will find in which condition. With the RP, you know you can buy a new machine for said price. This enables to plan availability as well as the curriculum, as the precise machine is known. This is the biggest value of the RP system anyway, the huge user base.
On the other side, it is perfectly reasonable to let the pupils find a screen on their own, most TVs or used computer screens will do.
They are a commodity, sold by a truckload, come from replacement of big corporations' PCs. Might not be good enough to give a whole state the same model though.
That would work then, but the price is still high for some people, so that would be a decent option for school districts that haven't been able to get all the Chromebooks they ordered. That's my district: They received a grant to buy Chromebooks, couldn't get all they needed.
That was an example. $1600 ultrabook costs $230 after 6 years. It includes display and there are cheaper models. Computing power has not changed much in the last ten years (just stay away from Intel Atom), maybe add some RAM and good to go. Bonus point — compatibility with x86 and x64 software, SATA.
I'm not talking about the cheapest. Cheap is important, but overall accessibility is what I'm getting at. That's what I meant in my OP in my comments about people intimidated by the bare hardware of normal Pi. The normal Pi is cheaper. The form factor and convenience of the Pi 400 make it a more accessible platform, especially for an 8 year kid old with poor parents that aren't very technical. This family doesn't know to avoid Atom CPUs, they don't know anything about installing RAM. They need something easy, off-the-shelf, and decently supported. And yes, also cheap. You're saying it's possible to do better than the Pi 400. I agree! I'm saying it's not practical to try to scale your approach across thousands of families.
Opening a brand new Pi and building up the environment is part of the attraction. An old machine that doesn’t support new features seems somehow inferior to a new machine that doesn’t support some stuff.
The satisfaction in making a tiny little computer board go is very apparent when you see a kid do it, even if it’s just to make some lights flash or boot into a Nintendo 64 emulator via a console. It all feels very close to the metal but without a great risk of damage.
My impression of a lot of poor areas, is that one of the first things they invest in is a TV. So they likely have a TV already. Switching between different usages of the TV they have is probably doable. Use the computer connected during day time for work, and use the TV functionality in the evenings for recreation.
I agree tablets and laptops are more accessible. But I think when it comes to really learning how to use a computer and realize its full potential you want a proper desktop computer with mouse, keyboard, connection ports. I think it is useful to learn how to plug in different USB devices, monitors etc.
Unlike a Chrome book or Tablet, a "real" computer give you a chance to learn about how a file system works, organizing files into folders. Using multiple programs to work on a collection of files. The single task orientation of tablets make them very user friendly and low threshold but that also limit you in how far you can go.
My kids started out on tablets but now I try to push them more onto using a regular computer.
Sorry but this is just silly. There's nothing more real about plugging in usb devices or dragging around files on a system file browser, it's just what seems normal to you.
It would be just like telling kids in the early nineties "this GUI stuff is great and all, but the real way to interact with computers is the command line". Or even longer ago, telling kids "this terminal is nice and all, but the real way to use computers is punch cards".
I also don't think the idea that ChromeOS is too locked down to be a real learning environment for kids really holds up. If anything, it's too open. There are billions of websites out there, and thousands or however many that might be excellent learning resources or sandboxes for kids, it can just be hard to know about them/find them all. But the abstractions are just shifting around, there are plenty of full development environments on the web where you can program and host entire apps. Or you can tinker with IFTTT or Zapier to connect different hosted services and hack them to do different things you make up. There's still a lot of room for creatively using technology, I certainly wouldn't sweat pushing kids onto "regular" computers instead of chrome books or tablets (beyond just a basic introduction to broaden their horizons and let them at least understand that this other paradigm exists).
You're focusing on the wrong stuff like the monitor and the webcam. This is a completely open computing platform... a Chromebook is a thin client for Google services. They couldn't be more different.
Small scale solutions would only create jobs for individuals and small enterprise, not corporate profits. Alternatives to consumerism is NOT welcome on hacker news.
My biggest beef with RPI is how much effort it takes it set it up as headless machine. Expectation was just plug USB-C cable and shell away. Nope. Connect to Wifi first. Then to use it's serial ports there's ton of conflicting info that I've gave up after spending days on it.
Finally no way to run headless if you wan't 64bit OS.
It's good computer for r/iamverysmart type of people, but not to be actually productive hacker.
Could you expand on that a bit more? I'm currently running a Pi3B+ 64bit Raspbian headless and have had no problems so far. Does the Pi4 not allow 64bit headless?
Raspbian 64bit seems recent and still in beta. I think I’ve tried to get Ubuntu and failed to find manual how to get it connect to my wifi with ssh enabled. I don’t have keyboard, monitor and hdmi adapters for this nonsense.
You have an objection to the content, instead of an ad-hom attack on me?
"Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US".
1) TV is comparatively cheap entertainment.
2) Flatscreens are the only kind of TV produced in years.
3) Is that objectively "a very high priority" for "poor people"? Citation needed.
4) Being poor sucks, and things which make life more pleasant would be a completely understandable high priority.
5) Obtaining things which make life better is a very high priority in all stratas of American life.
And yet the comment ""Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" doesn't sound filled with empathy, understanding, approval, celebration that even poor people can afford material goods in America, does it?
Instead, somehow, it sounds judgemental, critical, accusatory. In the middle of a thread about a Raspberry Pi which was designed and made to be cheap so that poor kids have a chance of computing access, with the context "even poor people have TVs" who would throw in that comment and why?
From an opinion piece[1]: "The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. [...] Regardless of how they were intended, poor people and minorities sense that with those comments Gingrich is winking — some call it “dog whistling” — at certain white audiences by intimating that black people are lazy, happy to live off the government and lacking any intellect."
That's obviously what happened here. The comment "Having a flatscreen TV is a very high priority for poor people in the US" does not say "poor people value education and it's a good thing even poor people have access to a TV where they could plug in a Raspberry Pi", it says "of course poor people will have a TV, they're lazy and watch TV all day and feel entitled to the luxury of a flatscreen, right guys?" wink wink, allowing the poster to deny any responsibility because "many poor people own televisions".
The Center for American Progress paper "Moving away from Racial Stereotypes"[2] says "The notion that poor people, particularly poor people of color, are lazy is the most significant and persistent stereotype affecting efforts to address poverty in our country." and "It’s notable that labels suggesting laziness or lack of effort that have been used to describe African Americans are also applied to poor people more generally." and "Getting tough on poor people is a way to try to win votes during elections, derail legislation, or distract attention from positions that would otherwise be unpopular. Given modern-day sensibilities, however, very few single out groups directly—instead of using words like “black” or “Hispanic,” they raise stereotypes and employ code words that let audiences know exactly which groups they are actually
talking about without actually saying so" and "Over the years, progressives have contributed to the continued association of African Americans and Hispanics with poverty"
That is, there's a certain demographic characterised roughly by older, white, 1950s, Republican, Fox-News watching, to whom "poor" means "black" and "TV" means "lazy", "flatscreen" means "entitled luxury" and "high priority TV" means "irresponsible" or "stupid", and the whole sentence is completely innocently deniable because everyone has a TV so it's just plain fact and completely innocent.
The only hint is that if it were a completely innocent observation, there would be no need to say it at all, no need to single out the poor, no need to mention "high priority", no need to mention "flatscreen". You'd just say "people who can afford a Raspberry Pi 400 probably have a TV, which is nice". And that was already said one comment before in the chain.
Sharing a TV with everyone and everything else in the house is far from ideal. A good number of home-computer users did it in the '80s, but only out of necessity. You need multiple fully-working TVs knocking about the house before giving one over to a computer is likely to be no problem, and that's probably a lot less universal.
I've done it, both relatively recently with a laptop connected to the TV and with a Spectrum +2A in the Good Old Days. It's pretty bad, and fortunately I am not and was not a child in a troubled household, or one of two children who both need to use the same TV to get their schoolwork done.
There definitely are possible concerns. I used my computer on my nice 4k tv for a bit and really liked it -- to the point where I went out and got a cheap 4k from Walmart... and returned it the same day, latency issues. TVs aren't designed to be nice monitors, but we're talking about cases where the alternative might be nothing.
Multiple kids -- definitely an issue, but it's still one fewer setups than before.
I was talking to some friends who are teachers about remote learning the other day. They were saying many of their students (they work in rural areas) had the devices but no access to internet. It's a very complex issue now with all the restrictions.
Starlink has just started beta service (without requiring an NDA like the pre-beta service did). ~100Mbps and a competitive 20-40ms latency (although I think sometimes you can get worse as the constellation isn't yet fully deployed... some satellites that have already been launched still haven't fully raised themselves to operational orbit, but this is still a Beta service, so that should be addressed within weeks). It’s spendy at $100/month (which is comparable to other, FAR worse, satellite internet options... and some non-satellite broadband in the US costs this much for worse service), but rural folk should qualify for the rural broadband subsidy which should help a lot.
I’m really excited about these LEO satellite constellations just solving the rural/urban digital divide. As launch costs continue to go down (SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 has already made a massive difference in making this feasible, about a quarter the marginal launch cost per kg, and Starship should enable an order of magnitude improvement on that) and competition increases (OneWeb has been brought through bankruptcy but is starting to launch again, plus Amazon’s Project Kuiper and the potential of launching on the partially reusable New Glenn), it’s an exciting time for the ending of digital poverty in rural areas.
You've reminded me of my anger about telcos promising to Congress to connect the USA shore-to-shore to the internet and then they just gave up and said "phones will be good enough." No, no they aren't.
"Using the Bells own words and filings, by 2000,
approximately 50 million homes should have been rewired with a fiber optic wiring to the home,
capable of 45 Mbps in two directions, which could handle over 500 channels of video and was
totally open to competition. About 86 million households should be wired by 2006."
Still waiting on that fiber optic connection to my home in 2020...sure would be useful to all the kids that are trying to learn remotely via a damn phone right now.
My makerspace has done a program with Title 1 schools, Girl Scouts, etc. where we give kids a Pi with keyboard, mouse, display and teach them a little electronics, coding, etc. The biggest learned lesson has been that many of them do not have internet access at home other than via a smartphone. So we started loading the Pi's with as much free educational content as we could.
During the past lockdown my University sent students without internet SIM cards with data contracts so they could use their cellphones to tether. IMHO in an emergency situation a public good like the radioelectric spectrum should be commandeered by the authorities --- mobile operators should provide free data service to students in need.
For people without internet in rural areas, cell data probably isn't a solution. Unless you live in a very flat area, being too far from civilization to get wired internet significantly correlates with being too far to get good cell reception.
I recently moved out of the bay area to a my house in relatively rural Oregon. I can't actually work from home though, I had to rent a second house in a nearby town because the best internet connection I can get at my actual house is GEO satellite internet which is far from suitable for work.
I'm only 7 miles down the road from a town of 700, and only ~30 miles from a city of ~20,000, yet I have 0 options for wired internet and 0 cell reception from any provider at home.
There was a stretch when you had Gateway, eMachines, Dell (et al) in competition that could have resulted in machines that cheap if the market for desktops hadn't died (relatively). But even now Dell's lowest-end desktop is $350, and that's with an i3.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's an engineered price point because lesser hardware at lower prices can't even be shipped and make a profit. And frankly, if I remember back 10-15 years, there were $350 boxes back then, too, so maybe it's a minimum price/rule of thumb that was calculated a long time ago.
Very curious to see how the third-party market will build up around this device. For the RPi Single Board Computer there is a lot of products to extend it into all kinds of directions, assuming one is willing to breadboard and maybe solder a bit. With this new PC/keyboard things are opening up even more for casual geeking around, which I think might bring even more people in. If the community picks it up I think it could be very impactful!
Back in 1988 or so in Norway when me and my brother got our first computer an Amiga 1000, that costs about $2200 adjusted for inflation. And salaries where lower then. It would have been impossible to buy without a generous "donation" by my grand parents which had quite some savings.
And back then salaries where much lower even adjusted for inflation. That Amiga had 256 KB of RAM. This Raspberry is just a beast in comparison to what me and my brother had and it costs 31x LESS, in a world where salaries are higher than back then.
I can see this opening up a lot of opportunities for families and schools in less affluent countries. Maybe even businesses. I can imagine various famers and small businesses out in the countryside in Africa or India could benefit from a computer like this to lookup market information for crops, plan budgets, savings, purchases etc.
My first computer was a CRT monitor / tower bundle from Sam's Club (back when it really was a warehouse club). 15" CTX monitor with a Pentium 75 mHz CPU, 8 MB of RAM, 540 MB hard drive, and I believe a 2 or 4x CD-ROM. Of course, it had a 3.5" drive.
I mean, I've had an Atari 65XE myself when I was a kid, but tvs are much bigger nowadays, less accessible and HDMI cables are much more difficult to run through the room (stiffness and length limits are real issues); OTOH keyboards and mice are easy to come by. The hard part of the Pi is the display. The kit also doesn't include a cam nor a headset, nor even a mic. This is super important for online learning. Maybe you could fit in a mic in the keyboard somewhere?
A Pi all-in-one (iPi if you excuse me) or a Pi-book in an affordable price range would be revolutionary. I have an old VGA-only monitor but guess what - no D-SUB on the Pi 400 and a proper dongle would be another... $30?
As is, nostalgia value is super-high but I don't feel it's as practical as one would hope without any kind of display.
I don't know if the monitor is as big of an issue, a quick search on walmart.com yields their cheapest option at $69.99 for a 19". That's if you have to buy one new. I'm sure the local craigslist would have second hand TVs with HDMI in. A lot of households already have multiple, cheap flatscreens. If we narrow the discussion to only those who cannot afford or do not have any of the above then I think we're also talking about the same group of people that would not be able to afford the Pi400 at its current price. It would be more beneficial (and probably cheaper) to focus on making aid available for them to obtain what they need rather than redesigning the system.
The webcam is a different issue, there doesn't appear to be much for a plug and play option for the Pi. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
If these were to be used as an option for remote education, I would hope that the same organization promoting them would also sell a kit with the system preconfigured to use an included webcam.
Even though it's not included (and supplies are incredibly constrained right now for new ones) a standard USB webcam can work. Logically it doesn't really make sense to include a built-in webcam for a keyboard form factor. Adding an external one doesn't make sense in terms of meeting their pricing goals.
Doubtless one of the resellers will augment this with a package that includes an inexpensive USB webcam.
How crazy is it that one of the Big Players come in, port their OS to the device, and more or less take it over as just another platform with a Start Menu?
Are you talking about Microsoft/Windows or Google/Chrome OS here? They're both Big Players, and both trying/would try to take over/appropriate the Raspberry Pi platform.
That would be useful given that many schools are standardizing their distance-learning based on Chrome OS, so (as much as I might want a more open OS) it might help streamline students' experiences on this.
Regarding the price you mentioned... this is awesome because it reminds me of the old Atari/Commodores you could buy at a store like K-Mart for $200-500 bucks. Which, granted, back then was a lot more than $70 now. I wonder how many programmers lives this thing will start like those old 8-bits did back-in-the-day.
A couple things - I worked at intel during the time we were trying to prove a sub-$1000 PC was even possible (hence celeron)....
But you know what would be really interesting with these guys - is if they would auto-hive once online - and would just have access to whatever apps were avail - say, you pick a role or profile (switchable) for the unit...
"e-learning box" or "games" or "news" or "community" such roles/profiles
And it would join that hive and then auto pkg whatever apps it needed to to provide access to those communities or content...
I understand the value proposition of Pi platform. It's definitely popular with quite educated audience in developed countries.
However, is Pi offering indeed reaching out to the developing countries? Are there any sources that substantiate the adoption of Pi platform in such communities, especially whether there're any lasting effects beyond the inaugural opening and ribbon-cutting, so to speak?
It's tempting to seek the BBC Micro effect from Pi platform, and I hope it can be achieved. Still, one needs to keep in mind that such effect largely was a result of a government policy which supported wide adoption.
Leaving aside developing countries for a moment; I know, personally, multiple game developers who have switched to using RPi4 and Pinebooks as their personal computing devices.
They hit this sweet spot of just enough power to be useful, yet totally silent (with a Flirc case on the Pi).
The RPi3b just wasn't quite there yet in terms of speed, but the 4 can easily drive dual monitors and provide enough oompf to be useful in a game jam. Quite a nice little device for hobby development.
Old iPhone hardware probably has a BOM less than $100.
Giving students a $100 phone + $10/mo of cell internet access for 9mos out of the year pays bigger dividends.
Besides the longest essay you have to write on the ACT, SAT or AP tests is about 300 words. You can do that on a phone - kids do it now on paper.
What if kids cram tests on their phones for a few hours then read books the rest of the day? Maybe take your phone outside. Sounds like a decent enough curriculum to me.
Anyway my point is you don’t really need a keyboard in education. And with that the logic of this stuff as an educational policy kind of goes away.
Yes, it's not perfect (mostly slow, and sometimes you have to try a few times to get both camera and audio working), but I got it working with my Logitech C920, and also with a Pi-zero + HQ Camera webcam that I set up using https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
It reminds me of what Apple does when it redefines a product category by "just" bringing together existing technology into a more convenient form factor and UX.
I don't know if this will quite have that level of impact, but I see the potential, especially now with remote learning: My kids are on a hybrid schedule. I'm fortunate to be able to provide them their necessary computing resources. Not everyone can: The district couldn't secure all of the necessary Chrome Books, and some students have been left attempting remote learning via their parent's phone, or simply left behind. A cheap mass market device has some truly amazing potential to fill in these gaps at the same time that it enables more advanced S(T)EM learning than you could get with a typical cheap Chrome Book.
I'm also old enough to remember when you'd be hard pressed to find a desktop computer for under $1000, perhaps $1500 adjusted for inflation. One for $70-$100 really just hammers home how far we've come.