MiiPC: $99 Family-Friendly Android PC | Hacker News Reader

MiiPC: $99 Family-Friendly Android PC

kickstarter.com

45 pointstonez52 comments

For comparison, here's a stick with double the RAM, double the cores, and double the flash for 30% less ($70): http://dealsprime.com/ugoos-ug007b-andriod-4-2-tv-stick-hdmi... . For literally a few $ more you can get the same spec in a set top case complete with Ethernet port, in a plethora of shapes and sizes. If these devices interest you, spend an hour reading http://www.cnx-software.com/ archives.

This computer only stands to highlight how completely abused Kickstarter is becoming: the project is little more than a schmoozy marketing gimmick to fund these guys to subcontract one of about a hundred different Chinese vendors to design and manufacture the boxes on their behalf. There's absolutely no reason to pay the premium, the market is already flooded with better alternatives.

The title of the kickstarter is:

   MiiPC - Power to the Parents!

and then the whole blurb is about how it lets you keep an eye on your kids online. Does that give you a clue that it's not about the hardware?

If their innovation is not in hardware, one wonders why they're designing hardware at all. Why not put their ROM on an existing ARM box?

Because it's designed for the living room? A generic ARM box won't look as good, have their branding or be as appealing to their target market.

Also, who's to say that they're building it? This is a relatively easy thing to contract out, and from the motherboard pics it looks relatively generic.

It's a product that people are willing to pay for and in return people get an accountable manufacturer (or at least a sympathetic community of other buyers) rather than a random Chinese producer. How is this abusing Kickstarter? The market being flooded clearly wasn't enough for them. They're buying exactly what is advertised.

I don't think manufacturers should feel bad for pricing a product comfortably (what a disaster it is when a Kickstarter project underestimates its costs), since anyone is free to undercut them at any time on the same service.

About the only assurance you're buying is that when a production run goes bad, it's an American rather than Chinese accent saying the words "your money is gone, this is what you get unless we find another $50k somehow. Sorry"

I you had written "an accountable manufacturer (or at least a sympathetic community of other buyers) rather than a random producer", you would have avoided one of the forms of racism that is socially acceptable to Western people at this time.

"completely abused Kickstarter is becoming"

The problem is that Kickstarter gets a 5% fee, so it is to their business interests to raise as much money as possible (even if the product isn't completely up to snuff)

In the short term, perhaps. Long term, why would they burn their business down like that? All it takes is a few high profile failures...

"Long term, why would they burn their business down like that?"

There are two ways of looking at the problem:

- from the side of the project sponsor, KS is already the gold standard. Think about forbes.com: forbes has a name but they still make money selling out the name. Even if there are high-profile failures, the storyline will be spun as failures of the projects and not the platform or process.

- from the side of the project creator, KS is an easy way to get a ton of money (far more than the fixed-funding campaigns of other sites like indiegogo)

I was looking into these recently, thinking the A15 dual core + T604 Mali in the Samsung chromebook was getting pretty good ($250 http://amzn.com/B009LL9VDG )... but the Acer chromebook, with a crummy intel celeron and HD 4000 is faster ($232 http://amzn.com/B00AG0BLWU - see the top review). But you can't buy an bare intel PC for $70.

Ordering yourself from China is a completely different proposition for these reasons... - No warranty - No after sales service and support - No users forum / community - Poor manuals and often poor production quality

For me, the premium of $50 or so dollars is well worth it.

The brief specs are only one part of the puzzle. The dongle, like many smartphones could most likely suffer from gimped flash interface and channels, low RAM speeds and slow USB (making accessing data on external HDDs painfully slow). Furthermore the thermal limits on continuous operation of the main chipset may be different (due to the difference in ventilation).

Which of the approximately 200 pre-existing, owned, tested and reviewed models over on cnx-software.com are you referring to? I'd rather take my chances buying something that already exists at a fair price, not last-generation vaporware sold at an unfair premium, targeted at those who don't know any better.

As for reliability, there are definitely some designs out there with heating issues and flaky wifi (missing antenna is common), but overall manufacturing quality doesn't vary much at any price point. It's not like these sticks are cheap because there's child labour involved, they all come from a small set of factories that rely more on volume to stay in business than anything else.

I thought the same, till I saw this: "Our founder - Young Song has successfully co-founded eMachines, the low-cost computer brand that pioneered affordable PC ownership and Internet adoption for consumers, and NComputing that leverages PC power and cloud computing to create a shared computing resource that connects multiple users at a low cost."

I'm not sold on MiiPC, but support, future updates and user experience come at a price.

"iPod ... No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Specs are rarely the most important part of the equation.

Perhaps the title is the problem here, but the innovation is not the box but rather the parent control and the accessibility for low-tech consumers.

Everyone yelling "ZORMG, you can get a cheaper bare linux/android/pi/etc" is missing the point. This outfit is selling simplicity, piece of mind, and parental control at a fairly low price point.

The real headline should be "$100 android PCs now reach technophobes."

Good point. Changed the title along the lines of your suggestion.

So you're telling me that these 3 guys, with 75 years of experience in the business including the ex-VP of eMachines, who sits on the boards of a bunch of companies, can't scrape together $50,000 to finish this thing?

What am I missing here? Is this just a publicity thing?

Also a validation of market.

Proof of market - And when that's complete, they also have their first few hundred units off of their shelves.

Am I the only one who thought this was somehow related to the Wii (and its Mii's) or otherwise related to Nintendo?

In other words, had the title been "MiiPC: $99" (without the "Android PC" part), I would have immediately assumed it had something to do with Nintendo.

They really should have avoided that name and/or spelling to ensure it wasn't mistaken for a Nintendo or related console. It would be different if it were a car or a vacuum cleaner -- but as a video game console, I think this is a bad name.

Sorry to go all tl;dr on you all but - how does this differ from the several dozen or so other Android mini-PC's out there? i.e. http://www.minix.com.hk/Products/NEOX5.html

This is different than the NEO X5 or its peers because it's bigger, slower [1], costs the same amount, and you won't actually receive it for six months or a year.

It also has a custom piece of software. Which is really what is being sold here.

[1]The NEO X5 is somewhat coy about it's clock speed. But the CPU is a Rockchip 3066. Which is "up to 1.6 GHz." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockchip#RK30xx_series

It looks to be keyed towards children and restricting their access to certain content and usage time frames. I suppose it will fill a niche market. But I certainly don't support its aim.

There are also substantially more powerful ones around: https://www.miniand.com/products/GK802%20Android%20Mini%20PC

Am I the only one who would love something like this, but with standard expandable memory and, maybe, a SATA or PCIe port?

And a better CPU?

I was aiming for a simple desktop fanless machine where I could run Emacs.

A real operating system would be nice, too.

And lets get rid of the computer and add an FM radio.

Ok, we just invented the Pontiac Aztek.

Sorry, i don't quite follow. But i upvoted you for surrealism.

It's possible to run a Debian or Ubuntu install side by side with Android (or simply install it instead of Android).

There is absolutely no motivation for pushing the price point lower. PCs are devices we expect to use for hours and hours and hours. A difference of $300 will make this into a real computer, most parents value their kids beyond such a petty price point.

$300 is still a lot of money to a lot of people. $99 is doable, sometimes $399 isn't.

If you can't afford $300 for your kids, you have big problems. You are certainly not the family shown in the advertizement. Also you need a keyboard and monitor which could easily set you back another $100. It is my humble opinion that the price differences between this and a real computer are unjustified, just buy your kids a real pc!

Yep, your living like a lot of people on the edge. You cover your bills and clothes and then don't do much else. I am truly disappointed that the opportunities I had to learn to program in the late-70's and early-80's are not there anymore. We have cut off a part of the population from learning to program early even though the price of computing has dropped.

believe me, I know plenty of people who wish they could afford half of that for their kids. with that said, the threshold of an affordable 'household pc' IMO plateaued years ago with a 4GB 2.5Ghz system, if that. if you look around, you can find an old system to revive for less than $100, and you can get a standard mouse/keyboard for 20 bucks.

Doesn't everyone realize by now that these android tv boxes are a dime a dozen here in China now? What the heck makes this a legitimate kickstarter? They have their PCBA in a tester, like they've actually designed the PCBA (NOT), and love how he said "our mobile app is near ready"...you can bet that app isn't more than a shell! Ridiculous.

Windows worst nightmare: Regular people (i.e not HN readers) using Android on the desktop.

Whether Google wants it or not, it seems people really want to put Android on PC's. If only Google helped that a bit by making Android more suited for PC's (from a user interface point of view).

A more interesting question is why not ChromeOS ? Most of what you want to do in a 'lean back' sort of experience ChromeOS should be really good at, and you get cost effective on the peripherals.

However, Android doesn't require the backend support that ties you to Google's cloud that ChromeOS does.

So the interesting question for me is, when do we see something Firefox OSish for this kind of box?

The reason so many varieties of these Android sticks exist is the SOC manufacturers involved are often only supporting Android in their BSPs. How that came to be is a wildly interesting topic in itself, and one that isn't talked about much.

Basically Freescale, Rockchip, Allwinner and a bunch more names I don't remember provide reference designs that boot Android out of the box. Of those names I believe only Freescale make any serious effort to support Linux directly at all.

You can get Ubuntu pre-built for Pandaboard http://www.omappedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Pre-Built_Binaries

I have a Pandaboard, its great. From a UX/Support point of view Android on it certainly looks nicer than Unity does, and in spite of the great work that the folks at TI have been doing the 3D accelerator support still seems to be better on Android.

That said, I don't doubt for a minute we're in a "new" place with respect to our home computing infrastructure. I am pretty close to building a 'browsing only' solution separate from the virtual machine I currently use.

> However, Android doesn't require the backend support that ties you to Google's cloud that ChromeOS does.

Well that's exactly it. If the Chromebook Pixel ran Android I might have been tempted to buy one. As it is I can't see myself shelling out that kind of cash for a machine that takes 30 seconds to boot Ubuntu.

Re "people really want to put Android on PC's" I think you can generalize to say people want Android in form-factors Google hasn't got the time to provide.

Or look at it this way: Google TV could have been an "Android PC" OS but Google TV isn't developed in the open. Initially, it didn't even have install-able apps.

This seems like one of those cases where more openness would be to Google's benefit.

This sort of thing leaves a sickening dread in my gut that kickstarter is really just a way to drag things down to the lowest common denominator.

I am wondering what the specs are? Not that it needs to be really powerful but still needs enough RAM to be usable.

they are listed on the page...

Technical Specifications:

- Processor: Marvell New Armada Dual Core 1.2GHz SoC / Memory: 1GB RAM

- Storage: 4GB Internal Flash (expandable via SD Slot and USB port)

- Connectivity: WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Ethernet Port, and Bluetooth (4.0)

- I/O: 2 USB 2.0 Ports, Speaker & Microphone Jack, HDMI (1080p/720p) output

right I just saw that and 1 GB is good. Was thinking the app and extra android features alone were not worth the extra money, but it seems really good value.

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