Am I wrong to think statements like these are just aspirational warm-and-fuzzies about the product without any real substance?
You could do all those things on anything, but they are typically incongruent with one another. If you are a beginner or a pro, you’re going to be better off doing it on a “more-standard” device.
* Boots almost instantly into a usable system
* I can read and understand every line of code that is running
* I can understand all of the hardware it's running on
We've gotten so used to computers not working. Weird stuff breaks all the time and even experts can only guess why beyond turning it off and on again, which takes minutes for most devices.
I dream of a world where we trust computers to work and be fast. It's completely possible, but step one is reducing complexity by several orders of magnitude.
I'm particularly sensitive to shallow critiques of new ways of computing, particularly those that encourage and enable people to be creative. Whether a project is successful or not, it's nice to see something that isn't a "bootup your general purpose comouter and then immediately open a browser" style of computing.
Attempting to get people to interact with the real world and also be creative should be commended.
I’ve been lulled into novel only-limit-is-your-imagination work environments that try to convince me to think they will be “transcendental” in my abilities.
A little while later, I run into software or hardware limitations only to face a physical malaise because I’d been troubleshooting a hardware or software problem for hours.
Take the “just write” angle. I do technical writing. I don’t trust that the built-in dictionary for that device is ever going to meet my spellcheck needs. I need mah Microsoft Word that I know how to navigate like the back of my hand, and I’m set.
Don’t promise a “Zombocom” device that doesn’t actually deliver.
This seems to be targeting the market of users with the following intersecting interests: * DIY hardware enthusiast * musician * python developer * maybe also wants graphics...? Seems a small segment to me, but I assume I'm missing something here.
The Pocket Operators have something similar (the KO at least, maybe the others). If you've written samples into them you want to preserve for playing live, you can snap a tab off and then they're read-only - no surprises on gig night.