Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Costs as much as the iPhone, weaker, and it won't even fit in your pocket!

You don't buy an iPhone for $100, you get a plan that you will pay a premium on that will pay for 'your' iPhone.

I'm putting the 'your' in quotes here because it seems that Apple thinks it still owns it as well, even though they give you the thing and give you a bill of sale.

Yea I know. I'm just saying when get one of these china made and designed computers you'll realize they're probably worth far less than $100.

It's $100 man lighten up. I'll bet you can do some cool hacking on it.

What the hell are you talking about? I'm stunned that we've come so far, so fast, that you can buy a fully functional portable computer for under $100!!

Your comparison with the iPhone, which is almost 10 times the price, is completely invalid. And your little slur on "China design" is also wrong. Countries don't design things, companies do. And it's not like America has any kind of reputation for good design besides the output of a single company - which is arguably largely due to the effort of a single man!

> which is arguably largely due to the effort of a single man!

I doubt that. I'm taking it that you refer to Steve Jobs here, and while he has a ton of influence there are a lot more people making a lot of effort than just him.

Steve Jobs by himself would - just like any other human being - have a hard time designing a functioning and well packaged toaster from scratch.

There are a lot of people involved in product development at Apple, any item they release is the product of the efforts of a very large team.

For the rest of it I completely agree with your comment.

Hm, I meant more that he'd instituted a culture of design obsession at Apple, not that he personally designed each and every product. I think the culture of perfectionism and extreme attention to detail at Apple is largely due to his efforts.

Thanks for the reminder, though.

My comparison was meant as an exaggeration, sorry if that wasn't clear. The country does not design however the culture, accepted standards, less regulation, the regular market they cater to, etc, do mean that china more often than not design products that may be considered sub standard quality. I've lived there so you would know when you've actually held and used some of these genuine china made products. At the north American int'l auto shows, chinas prototypes had visible defects, were hell ugly, and partially constructed of bamboo.

Now this company may be better, but chances are this computer has poorer build quality.

I don't think they did much designing other than to take the atom reference motherboard and find a way to graft an ARM in there, all the rest looks like a dead ringer for the eee pc.

Build quality is something you can only establish by looking at the product and preferably disassembling it. Even then you still have to remember it's a statistics game, something may look excellent and yet it could fail miserably and in large numbers over a longer period of time.

But you can be root.

You'll be able to type on it faster than iPhone. Not to mention attach USB peripherals. Although I'm into tablets too, very often what I need from a portable doesn't demand much in the way of processing power, just the basics.

As a bonus, the cheaper products like this, being made with generic parts, are often more hackable/upgradeable than the more expensive branded models where features are locked down to ensure market segmentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com