Raspberry Pi 400 – CyberDeck Project | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi 400 – CyberDeck Project

learn.adafruit.com

74 pointsmaydemir10 comments

I'm a big fan of Adafruit and the Pi, and I recently bought one of these "CyberDeck" add ons, but I'm annoyed that Adafruit chose to appropriate a generic term, cyberdeck, as the product name. This happens all the time, such as when IBM named their personal computer "The IBM Personal Computer" and what had once been a generic term became a specific product reference. Microsoft did this with "Windows", Intel did it with "Core", and more recently Musk did it with "Starship". Doing this muddies up the use of the generic term and can require extra effort to disambiguate (more so when speaking than in writing). I tend to see these choices as a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination.

Ok, but the product is called “Adafruit CYBERDECK HAT for Raspberry Pi 400”. It’s not really muddying the waters to call it “cyberdeck” for short when you’re writing an article about it...

"cyberdeck" is a generic term? Is that you, Case?

Since William Gibson coined the term in Neuromancer, it has become a common, if ill-defined, word for some sort of portable computing device, especially in a cyberpunk context.

There's an existing community around the term. E.g., https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guGffGw3uDg is another great cyberdeck with portability in mind.

Literally the first thing I'm tempted to test with that thing is how much force it would take to break it. It looks like it would not take much.

Yeeaaaahh, that looks very much like an ATA cable connector, and I've broken quite a few of those just trying to remove cables from motherboards. Maybe they custom-cast it out of a harder plastic, but I wouldn't trust it to be truly portable.

Seems like it would put strain on the GPIO connector and lead to eventual failure. A ribbon cable would be better IMO.

They already sell ribbon cables if you want those [1] or of course you can use any 40-pin cable you might still have lying around from the 1990s. Literally the whole purpose of this product is if you want a more rigid angled connection (and a retro-futuristic name).

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4823

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