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Comment by rockmeamedee | Hacker News Reader

This is great, but for people who want to "get started in computing", don't they also need a display, a mouse and a keyboard?

LCD screens are like, $100, a mouse is $10-$20 new and low-end keyboards are $10-$30. At that combined price, why does it matter if the computer is $25 or $5?

And if one is going to outlay the 150 bucks in peripherals, they might as well spend a bit more than $5 on the computer to get a significantly better computing experience.

Is there anything else going on here? Do they have a different approach that I'm not getting? It feels like, yeah, Moore's law is great and computers are cheap, but once RPi got to around or <$50 (which it did with the first version anyway), the computer was already cheaper than everything you needed to plug in to it.

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With shipping (and the fact that Pis are currently hard to get) Pis can go up to $40 or $50.

In countries like India, that's expensive. Not prohibitively, but you think twice before using a Pi for a project. I'm currently studying at a tech institute and have been part of the group trying to get folks to do more tech. Generally we focus on Arduinos for freshmen because they're 3x/4x as cheap as a Pi and easy to get your hands on. I'd love to have more folks doing projects with Pis, but it's just too expensive.

Peripherals? They're lying around. You can find an old monitor or TV anywhere, or just share one with an existing machine. A lot of projects with Pis don't even need peripherals.

There is a lot of peripherals lying around. Even years ago when I didn't have two pennies to rub together I could still get unwanted keyboards/mice and even smaller unwanted screens.

On the flip side, I don't need a screen for all my computers. Some are network devices now (SSH only) and some share the same screen because I use them for different things at different times.

Right? But there are also plenty of computers with 512 MB of RAM lying around that you can get for free. And they're 'programmable' too.

Physical space, noise, and running costs are also important considerations for many people.

Yes, running this as a useful network device (storage, irc bot, etc..) off a small solar panel is pretty neat side project.

While this is not enough to run a latest MS or IntelliJ IDE and Chrome with 100 tabs open, 512 MB is adequate to run vim/emacs, some Ruby / Python / Go / Node.js / Rust / you-name-it code, and a moderate browser session. Quite enough to gain some highly marketable skills using hardware that costs a couple of cups of coffee to nothing.

>LCD screens are like, $100

http://www.walmart.com/ip/41177602

>a mouse is $10-$20 new

http://www.walmart.com/search/?query=mouse&sort=price_low&ca...

Looks like your link broke walmarts website. Don't expect that from larger companies...

Working for me. Could have been a hiccup due to Thanksgiving/Black Friday shopping traffic.

As useless as walmart's website is, I doubt that HN could break it by simply visiting. As the other poster said, if it's broke, that's probably due to black Fri/holiday traffic.

Being on the front page of HN is worth about 20,000 hits a day in my experience. My $5/month VPS running every single page load through the incredibly slow BeautifulSoup parser handles it no problem. A link in the comments is probably an order of magnitude less traffic than that.

A lot of people already own TVs that would work as a display for this. My local Microcenter (which sells this new RPi too) has mice for $1 and keyboards for $4. You probably need to spend a few more dollars on cables and storage but I think you could easily walk out with a functional system for less than $20 total, maybe less than $15.

At thrift stores they can barely give away mice and keyboards. Just checked craigslist, keyboards and mice were $5 each and a monitor was $20. So a few hours work at minimum wage and you have a computer.

> This is great, but for people who want to "get started in computing", don't they also need a display, a mouse and a keyboard?

Who are you quoting there? It's not the article.

Is Raspberry Pi being marketed at beginners, or for conventional desktop use? That wasn't my impression.

That may not be the goal of this particular model, but it was the point of making the Raspberry Pi in the first place, yes. It was meant to be a modern equivalent to the BBC Micro; a way to give every kid affordable access to a computer with an aim towards teaching them computing (as opposed to using an office suite). They'd need a keyboard of some sort, but they could use a television as a monitor (as most of us once did). Languages like Scratch were part of the project. That seems to have gotten lost among the possibilities that a small, cheap Linux machine offers to the grown-ups among us.

Good point although remember that the (full size) Raspberry Pi has composite video output that can be used with the cheapest of TVs.

IMO the Raspberry Pi Zero is more of a reaction to the C.H.I.P $9 computer on Kickstarter and not a cheap computer for people who cant afford a full size Pi.

There are pin headers on the zero for composite out - should be cheap+easy to bodge a jack, but it would pretty much weigh as much as the zero itself...

True, but imagine an university that could have a few peripherals and each kid could have their own RPi and share the monitors.

Maybe it also makes it easier to do more daring things with it? it it breaks it's only $5.

Commodore 64s, ZX Spectrums, BBC Micros and the like never came with monitors, you just used your TV. This board has HDMI out on it, or composite if you solder in a connector, so you can use it with your existing TV or monitor.

A mouse is optional too, you can do everything you need to from the keyboard.

So really, it's only a keyboard that you need.

I'd be more interested in a cheap LCD+keyboard plastic thing with batteries. I hope raspberry is considering this option, or that somebody is trying it.

To be honest the cheapest android phone costs 60 bucks, so I wonder if there should not be some attempt to have a development suite that can be usable with a touch screen.

I'm guessing it's a rework on the compute module : small enough connectors to avoid having to remove them to start with and cheap enough to put it anywhere an arduino isn't quite powerful enough to work.

This sort of stuff is great for setting up some kind of automation. Places where you would want a small computer, without all the peripherals.

The use cases for such a device go as far as one's imagination.

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