Old Computers are usually rather big, heavy and a bit limited in their ability in terms of interfaces. Like they often have no sd-card-slot, bluetooth or wifi. And yes, they need more power.
This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids, has all necessary interfaces to make something funny and can on worst even run from a manual energy-source (which of course is more relevant for a poorer country than a rich country).
I can see kids taking this RP400 around like a (paper)notebook, work with them at school, home, their friends home or somewhere else and motivating them to use them more than some stationary device. And because of the hdmi they even can switch places fast if neccessary, limiting the interuptions in their work.
One city government around here threw away over 100 HP thin clients. They run on about 10-20W. I plan on making a nice cluster out of them.
The point I was trying to make, which doesn't seem to come across, is that spending $ on new equipment is a shortcut. A quick fix. Spending just a bit of time seeking out the sources of e-waste in your community, in the right technical hands, can pay off big.
You don't have to feed the beast. It doesn't take much vision to see that the action of paying $ into a system that happily externalizes all damage is part of the problem and directly contributes to the ecological and socialogical degradation we are all hopefully observing.
You can get all you need for hardware for free if you spend the time to seek it out and at the same time, you are helping clean up the mess.
We developers, many of us have been around from the time that 16K was a lot of memory, a 40MB hard drive could hold all you had, and 1 MHz was fast enough to play with almost any of the ideas in computer science. This is still true for many many tasks. I would argue that learning algorithmic complexity (big O) can be easier when you don't have a massive amount of compute that blasts through O(2^n) in about the same time as O(n) for many data sets. Try that on an apple II. A ten year old computer can have 16G of ram and run dual cores over 2GHz. You can learn a heck of alot of computer science with one of those machines. No need to feed the beast.
> This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids
Not usefully it can't. There's no display, so that "everywhere" is restricted to places that have an HDMI display just hanging out. Which is then a vanishingly small number of places. And since we're talking about kids - places with a front panel HDMI port, which is even rarer. Or you have to pair it with a portable monitor, in which case you spent as much as an entry level laptop and got something worse in return.
This is a cute little toy, and I want one, but that's all it is - a toy. Same as all the RPI's before. Good intro to hobby electronics programming with the GPIO, but not a disruptive entry-level computing experience, either. That place remains in the realm of the ultra-budget laptops, as they require no existing infrastructure.
Other than your own living room at home, where do you go that has a TV just hanging around free for use? Coffee shops don't. Classrooms don't (certainly not enough for every student, at least). Parks don't. Trains/busses/airplanes don't. Backseat of the parents minivan probably doesn't, either.
Like where else can you use this other than a basically permanent installation at home for this to qualify as "taken everywhere by kids"?
This RP400 is small, can be taken everywhere by kids, has all necessary interfaces to make something funny and can on worst even run from a manual energy-source (which of course is more relevant for a poorer country than a rich country).
I can see kids taking this RP400 around like a (paper)notebook, work with them at school, home, their friends home or somewhere else and motivating them to use them more than some stationary device. And because of the hdmi they even can switch places fast if neccessary, limiting the interuptions in their work.