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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I'm having a hard time finding a reason why I would buy this over the Raspberry Pi. Like others have said for this to be useful as a general purpose computer you need to buy add-on boards for video. Compare that to the RPi Zero which is $5 bucks and includes an HDMI port. You can easily add a USB ethernet or wifi adapter to the zero for under 4 bucks and have a real $9 computer.

Not to mention the CHIP uses an AllWinner processor which has a record of not playing well with open source and a history of security issues.

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The CHIP has much better audio support than the Pi. The Pi does not even have an ADC. The CHIP has a 24 bit ADC. I could see it being used in audio engineer applications where a Pi would not work.

This is pretty much what sold me on CHIP. With PocketCHIP, my dreams of a handheld Linux computer with audio editing capabilities can finally come true.

Pi Zero is $5 but it doesn't have blue tooth, or Wifi and you're probably going to need a dongle to use an HDMI cable and a dongle to convert the micro USB to a usable real USB. The CHIP is pretty much a cheaper Pi Zero.

This is more of a retro 8-bit game platform. It can be inserted on this hardware: https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

Careful that a stock C.H.I.P need to be reflashed in order to work with the PocketChip.

Only problem is the Pi Zero has pretty poor availability.

I think the problem is that it's so cheap it undercuts all the other more expensive models that have higher margins. When you look at adafruit's website for example, they still have plenty of zeros packaged in kits that sell for 30+ dollars but bare zeros have been out of stock for months.

I think the problem is that it's so cheap that the foundation don't want to make many of them. It doesn't actually seem to sell all that fast compared to its bigger brothers from what I can tell, but there's so few of them produced that they sell out rapidly every time they're in stock.

Really ? Under 4 bucks for a MicroUSB wifi dongle - do you have a link ?

Not OP, but:

Dongle:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/150M-USB-Wifi-Micro-Adapter-D...

And converter:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Ugreen-Micro-USB-OTG-Cable-Ad...

$4.24 all up. Not quite under $4, but pretty damn close.

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