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Comment by PKeeble | Hacker News Reader

Education might be the stated aim of the project but its not the limit of the device. This is a device similar to an Arduino except for the fact its got HDMI, USB, is about 700 times faster and in the order of 256 million times more RAM and its only 25% more expensive. Its a hardware hackers delight and a desktop capable computer. It is also a very real competitor for nettops which sell in the millions at a price point 5-10x higher than this.

It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.

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I agree with everything you have said about the potential of the Raspberry Pi. My surprise was at the tone of the reaction on this thread. That these people have spent this long on such a worthy project and have produced something that is probably truly exceptional. We should be grateful and excited. I don't think it has been let down at all. We will all get one, just maybe not immediately.

Right now no one knows when the release will be. What we have here is a limited beta release to 10,000 people or so, not the actual product launch. That will be coming at an unknown point in the future, probably. People are frustrated by this realisation because the makers claimed it would be the real release. But I think its been obvious for at least 2 months that it would exactly what it is today (no one expected the website to die of course but the product selling out in seconds they predicted correctly).

They deserve criticism for getting the launch wrong. Until the hardware gets tested we don't know if that works. My fear is that the hardware shows the same lack of attention and it doesn't work very well. It needs to be called what it is, a potentially great product with a disastrously bad launch.

Really, you're totally misreading this.

They got the product right and there was absolutely no way in hell that they could have done better than this at launch day. If they had sold 10 units I'm sure you would have had your criticism ready as well and to extrapolate from selling out in 10 minutes flat to 'fear that the hardware shows the same lack of attention and it doesn't work very well' is simply stupid.

If you want to criticize the RasberryPi folks then I suggest you show us all how you will do better. I'll be cheering you on, even if you sell out on day one.

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