On 12/02/2013 01:28 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:

>
> I would call $10 "reasonably inexpensive", but at £25 it costs *exactly*
> the same as the Model A of the Raspberry Pi. You get more I/Os, but
> 192KB of RAM instead of 256MB. But I do like the project.
>


True, but comparing with the Raspberry Pi isn't really fair ;-)

Literally millions of Raspberry Pi boards have been shipped.  If this 
Micro Python board were made in such quantities, its price would drop 
substantially.  When he set that price point, he was assuming quantities 
in the hundreds, and presumably he added some margin to compensate him 
for his design time (all his spare time for the better part of a year so 
far).

And the Pi is entirely closed-source hardware.  You can't make your own, 
and you can't redesign it or otherwise evolve the hardware.  (And it 
cannot boot without a proprietary binary blob that outsiders cannot 
modify or audit.)

Things like Arduino and this Micro Python board can evolve independently 
of any central control, and anybody can make them.  We should expect to 
pay a premium for this advantage, at least at the beginning.

Once the design files are released, if the hardware becomes popular we 
should expect many players to enter that market and the price will start 
a race to the bottom, just as happened with Arduino and its descendants.



BTW, I neglected to mention earlier in the thread that this hardware is 
fully capable of driving a graphical display and supporting a GUI.  His 
early videos show it driving a low-res LCD, but I'm curious to find out 
if it could drive something like a 512x342 pixel monochrome display.

Because if it can, that means it could conceivably support a GUI as good 
as that of the original Macintosh.  (Remember how good that was?)  This 
board has 50% more RAM than the first Mac, more than twenty times the 
speed, thousands of times more storage, and thirty years' worth of 
further software development to tap into.  (Not to mention networking, 
which the first Mac had no inkling of.)

The first Mac was inspired by that legendary visit to Xerox PARC.  They 
saw a GUI there.  And Alan Kay showed them Smalltalk.

I'm getting one of these boards...