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Comment by tbrock | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone buy this over the much more powerful ARMv7 odroid-C1 for $35 that has been out for months now?

The Raspberry Pi is a platform optimized for and bundled with its community. The Raspberry Foundation can produce/license any conceivable number of these devices at the same price point. The difference of for example $35 vs $70 doesn't matter very much for individual buyers. It does matter when dealing with educational budgets and a desire for predictable spending. Even when a school/hobbyist course requires students to buy their own devices, even $5 differences can be a big deal.

The fixed price, high bulk, cooperation with education initiatives and governments, all translates to a relatively homogeneous, unfragmented "fleet" of devices, which just isn't the norm in small computers.

Beagle Bone, the Odroid series, and several other products are technically superior in most ways. But they don't have a comparable community size, and aren't focused on the educational sector as much. In some ways, these models attach to the Raspberry Pi community.

You've got it exactly. The whole thing is modeled on the original BBC computer learning project of 30 years ago. The physical Pi device is just a platform for the delivery of educational material. People miss this because most of the commentators here don't need the educational material as they're not schoolkids or educators.

The Foundation is doing this in a highly vertically integrated way because it gives them predictability and a guarantee that the hardware meets the educational needs and also the "marketing" needs of turning kids into enthusiasts. That's why Minecraft for the Pi is important, for example.

One important difference is cost - the BBC micros were expensive compared to their competition.

You know, one variation of the Raspberry Pi I'd like to see for the educational market, is a standard graphing calculator based on the Pi's internals. The reason: Even though I'm not convinced that graphical calculators really help students that much, many schools require them anyway. So why not take a (somewhat expensive) necessary device, and make it more functional when you plug in a keyboard/monitor?

I wonder what the price point could be of a device with a decent screen (somewhat better than the TI's), battery/charging, physical buttons, case, plus the Raspberry Pi?

There are many reasons.

The large community that is involved with the Pi. The large number of tutorials, and guides available. The incredible amount of accessories available and customized for the Pi. The Pi has the momentum. The odroid-C1 may be fantastic, but it's the first time I've ever heard of it.

I hesitate to chime in, but in the interest of completeness:

The Odroids all use Mali graphics. Mali isn't particularly worse than the Pi's VideoCore IV, but it's not particularly better either...

And the BeagleBone vs Pi comparison here is worth reading: http://section9.choamco.com/2012/07/beagleboard-vs-beagleboa...

P.S. I double-checked that the Odroids are all shipping with Mali. Happy to be proven wrong though. Does anyone know of similar-priced dev boards from Qualcomm? Qualcomm's Adreno is definitely the most interesting GPU architecture in this space. Adreno is an anagram of Radeon.

other dev boards:

"Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs" (Dec 31, 2014)

http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-2015-with-40-linux-friendl...

"Nine sub-$50 SBCs that challenge the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black: 86Duino, A10-OLinuXino-Lime, Arduino TRE, Banana Pi, BPi D1, HummingBoard-i1, Odroid-C1, Orange Pi, and pcDuino3 Nano"

Wow, some of those names... lots of *duino and Pi. And anyone would wonder why people choose Arduino and RPi, because everything else is an imitation.

"... Why would anyone buy this over the much more powerful ARMv7 odroid-C1 ..."

It's not just the hardware you buy into. You also by default have the available operating systems, the software available for the OS and the community.

In addition to what others have said, the C1 isn't actually more powerful than the RPi2. They should perform about the same in terms of CPU. The main thing the C1 has over it is the GbE port.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984704

Nobody got fired for buying RPi?

Basically. When you buy RPi, you are getting access to a vast community of knowledge and guides, which is very useful for hardware projects.

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