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Comment by reemrevnivek | Hacker News Reader

$25 for a textbook? If only! I spend $50-$300 per class for engineering textbooks.

Also, the analog port is, I believe, only available on the $35 version of the Raspberry Pi. It also works with HDMI and DVI (the latter through an adapter), so you don't need to go scrounging for an analog TV.

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The $25 textbook reference is based on children at school, not young adults in universities. I don't know about America, but in England $25 is a pretty good estimate for textbooks used by 8-18 year olds.

I think the comparison is supposed to be with high / secondary school textbooks, which are cheaper than university ones. Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1]

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2

If only that were the case... When I was in high school, replacing a lost Calculus textbook would have cost $120.

I suspect $25 for a textbook is more common in non-Western countries, which would likely be a great market for these things as well.

I think both the analog port and the hdmi port are available on both versions (model A and model B, shades of the BBC micro). THe only difference between the 2 is the amount of RAM (128 vs 256) and the IO (1 USB vs 2USB + Ethernet). Be aware that the B's 2 USB + ETHERNET are internally connected to the Broadcom's single USB port though... you're not adding bandwidth, just ports.

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