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Comment by hosay123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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