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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I think this is probably a mistake, as I doubt people who don't know they're purchasing a hobbyist/selfsupported device will know or care about the difference between "community pricing" and "retail pricing".

Hopefully it works out for them.

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Hmm. Set up a command line store. That would filter out people looking for a deal!

And, on the flip side, I would adore a store that was accessible over SSH. (That is, it's not just selecting against non-techies; some of us more technical folks would see it as an improvement over a web UI)

In related news, I learned today that one can't buy anything from the Apple Store iOS app without signing in with an Apple ID.

Then again, you can't even install the Apple Store app without an Apple ID.

I love this idea!

Yeah I get the same vibe from the whole thing. If someone can't read the obvious disclaimers on the store that the device is community driven and to expect some work to make it run, what hope is there that they will understand they HAVE to pay that 10$ increase?

They need to hide the community store and do SEO on the consumer store so noobs won't even be able to find the wrong store.

Offer a $100 "retail edition upgrade" when they ask for support, pointing back to the disclaimer?

Or bump the default price $100 dollars and offer a “unsupported developer edition” for 100 less.

Sure, but do you remember the story ~3 years ago of the girl who didn't know what Ubuntu was but saw that it dropped the price of her Dell PC so she picked it?

She then proceeded to raise a fuss and create a lot of negative press even though she was irrevocably the person to blame.

TLDR: Try to design systems that are full proof, in this day and age people don't read and the truth doesn't mean anything.

EDIT: That was 11 years ago what the hell happened to those years ?!

A similar model worked for Red Hat, where you got the software free but if you needed support you paid. This is like that, but with hardware. I think it will work out fine.

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