The benefit is pretty crucial: friction. If you have a tethered VR headset, the amount of work you need to do to set it up is insane. Especially with lower-level software like Simula.
It is only replaceable and upgradable if this company sells these compute modules separately. There is no discussion I saw on that website that they are committing to do this and there is no guarantee they will be around to still sell you one in the future. Even if they do, you are locked into their ecosystem.
>The benefit is pretty crucial: friction. If you have a tethered VR headset, the amount of work you need to do to set it up is insane.
I have never used a VR device on Linux and maybe the work involved there would be truly "insane", but I have used a few on Windows and they are basically completely plug and play after you install the software. Although even with the work involved, this seems to be an enthusiast device aimed at techies. If these customers are looking for a frictionless experience, they probably wouldn't be daily driving a Linux machine in the first place.
The friction is both what we experienced as part of adoption and in my personal experience. Actual personal experiences may vary, of course.
I didn't realize you were involved in this company until I read your other comments. It is unclear what "You're locked into some of our custom components" means. Can a average techie, maybe someone who is comfortable opening their laptop to add RAM or new storage but wouldn't be comfortable making any other hardware changes, upgrade this with off the shelf parts? If the answer is yes, that should be in your marketing material. If the answer is no and you can't commit to selling these custom modules, then I stick to my original point.
Yes, about as easy as opening a laptop. Unscrew some screws, lift a cover, install a new M.2 SSD or whatever. This is a picture of the "standard" assembly: https://i.kane.cx/NFIpf4 -- compute element slots into a connector, and there's the standard M.2 slot etc. Ours won't be too different, just a different form factor/connectors/additional features.
We're committing to selling all custom parts for at least a few years, but I can't give a hard number on how long. I'd say 4 years for sure.