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Comment by Athas | Hacker News Reader

I really like these machines. Unfortunately, I'm in Europe, where they seem to be harder (or riskier) to get hold of. I suppose I should also try to think of something reasonable to do with them, given their cost...

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Fellow EU here: I was curious too, but the high cost + the insane import duty + risk of return. I'm 99% sure if I RMA'd it like OP did, the local customs would somehow not understand that it's a replacement/repair and sting me for the import duty once more :(

This is the main reason I didn’t buy one.

Worth noting that I actually feel quite bad about this, I really wanted to try one out, and vote with my wallet in favour of more open hardware, an alternative architecture and to support a smaller company like Raptor. I eagerly followed all the news around Raptor (both here on HN, lobste.rs and elsewhere) and read all the guy "ClassicHasClass"'s blogs @ talospace.com - but in the end I unfortunately can't justify to myself the expense (when I spec out a modest Blackbird system it consumes the better part of a month's salary, I've recently bought my first flat and I sense a recession around the corner...). That actually makes me feel a bit hypocritical and part of the "problem", but maybe I'm not actually the target market.

Anyone wanting control of a powerful modern computer is part of the target market. We just haven't been able to drive the price down further at this time -- doing hardware design around fully open source firmware is hard and a lot of the typical shortcuts to lower costs (including the always-concerning "post-sale monetization" concepts) simply aren't something we find acceptable on any level.

Basically, it doesn't do anyone any good for us to lower cost by giving up the full owner control experience that is centric to our product lines. :)

Keep an eye out for an EU distributor of ours -- probably sometime late this month / early next if all goes well...

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