the attitude that stuff from brands you don't recognize from Shenzhen are "flea market dreck" is exactly why Chinese brands like DVI are winning
- Wires I bought for breadboard prototyping turned out to not be made of copper after I noticed them sticking to a magnet on my workbench.
- A power supply module I purchased appeared to be using counterfeit chips. The switching frequency didn’t match the TI data sheet for the markings on the chip.
- I wasted several days trying to get an sdcard module to work. I gave up and ordered from adafruit instead and those worked on the first try.
Not to mention the well documented problems with counterfeit sdcards, etc.
With mini PCs, there are a million different ways bargain brands can cut corners that won’t show up immediately.
as far as I know you can't be a racist against SoC
Amazon doesn't show you the race of the product owner (and typing this I realise how fucking stupid that sounds)
However Amazon also doesn't care about what shit it sells you, so its perfectly possible to be scammed by some shady org out for a quick buck.
Even if you spend the time to research the right brand, Amazon doesn't actually guarantee that it'll sell you that brand, through a lot of weird bate and switch and "other sellers also offer", and just plain deceit, its not that hard to end up with expensive shite.
I have a bunch of n100s for both home and work. currently we have a 1/4 failure rate (combo and beelink and trigkey green, and others)
I still have all my Pis working, apart from the ones that got wet. (however, thats SD card dependent. Thats at least cheaper.)
> the attitude that stuff from brands you don't recognize from Shenzhen
Its not Shenzhen thats the problem, its Amazon/marketplace trying to make a fast one palming off shite as gold.