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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

So other than the price being wrong (whatever your price is, it should beat the Intel NUC), I think that you need to add more pricing options for the campaign. $5, or $350 is way too big of a jump.

I mean, you could offer a $20 level for a mention in the installer/release, as a supporter, at the very least?

To be honest, I might approach Intel (at least send an email) about licensing the NUC and maybe getting at least a cheaper price on it, and using it as the base of your platform (if you're looking for something cheap & x86, with a little bit of power.

Disclaimer - I work for Intel, but I do not speak on behalf of Intel the corporation or of any of it's employees, rather I give this comment on my own behalf.

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Thanks for the suggestions! Wow, it would be great if you could talk to Intel about licensing the NUC at a lower price, we could indeed use it (and the additional better hardware) and it would likely be better than what we've spec'd out for the same price point.

Note that it may not be quite right to compare the price with the barebones NUC though - we do include 4 GB RAM, an SSD hard drive (we're hoping for at least 64 GB, if not more) and do some manual work in pre-installing Ubuntu on this (no Windows tax!) so you have a fully-working system out of the box.

With the NUC, you would have to buy the components yourself and install Linux, which would likely come to the same price point (again, we realize most HN readers can do this with their eyes closed.)

EDIT: as for the $20 "supporter mention during the installer" suggestion - we want to install stock Ubuntu, so this might be hard. We can probably put up a perk that involves having the contributor's names on our website, etc.

yeah so maybe the NUC is not a good example (I had no idea it costs so close to $300) -- but this is better: http://liliputing.com/2012/10/more-small-pc-boards-with-x86-...

You should have quite a bit of space after $80 -- the NUC is more expensive than I expected it to be (I thought it was closer to 200 than 300). I do still encourage reaching out and seeing if they would at least like to take a stab at this. While I'm not the kind of mover-shaker that would be able to muscle this through, I think you could get some serious consideration. I can look into the proper channels next week also.

Oh and yeah, if you're installing stock Ubuntu you probably might not be able to do that... but maybe changing something small like setting the default home page to your distribution's thank you page? or something

Also, cool/catchy linux-themed T shirts will go a long way.

The motherboard shown on lilliputing.com looks good - but at $80 for the motherboard, and once you add $75 for the case and power supply and fan, plus SSD ($80) and RAM ($40), the total's quickly going to close to what we've already priced our unit at. :-/

We did quite a bit of research - this was really the lowest we could price it at given our volume and the BOM (cost of raw materials.)

Something like a t-shirt and a donation to the EFF, EPIC, or something? Stickers maybe?

Excellent idea! With a T-shirt, we couldn't use the Ubuntu/Canonical logo, but maybe we can do a T-shirt with a message that says "Support pre-installed Ubuntu/Linux!" or something similar on it. Let me talk to our designer friend and see if we can put something together fairly quickly. The donation to EFF, etc sounds like a good idea too!

We'll discuss this and try to have some additional perks in there by early next week.

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