On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 5:42 PM, rh_ <[email protected]> wrote: > I was reading about a $9 board on kickstarter. It is based on an allwinner > chip. > > An interesting board and price. A loss leader for sure but I don't know > what the loss will lead to. Bankruptcy? Dissolution? Too many long > days? I wonder if they know or if they are too busy rolling in $$. > > The reason I am posting here is because the BB-X15 makes sense in the > context of a $9 board. Racing to the bottom never ends well and hides > true costs in all aspects of any endeavor and maybe more so in a modern > engineering project because of the raw materials required, the wages > that some in the chain get (or don't get), etc., etc. > > But does the X15 go too far the other way? Or is the projected price > closer to a real price with profits built in? This is more rhetorical > but the $9 board price is curious and made me reconsider the X15 price. > > p.s. I don't know the X15 price and maybe no one does. The ballpark > price was hinted at in previous post on X15. > >
I've read about that board as well. Their kickstarter FAQ doesn't indicate anything about being a loss leader, but claims that they are getting there through high volumes. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer#project_faq_132939 I'm not saying it may not be a loss leader, but why wouldn't they come right out and say something like "Price is $9 for kickstarter and rises to $xx after the campaign."? I've seen that done in several other cases. The concept of a race to the bottom is a frequent topic in business management and development. The Innovators Dilemma (http://amzn.com/0062060244) covers this occurring to several industries. Imo the BBB, RPi, MSP430 and Arduino are themselves just these cases of "racing to the bottom". The difference is perspective. If you are the one racing there then you'd probably consider it innovation. If we take a lesson from history its likely that these lower cost boards will make higher cost boards raise their capabilities in order to play in a different market space that is likely to disappear over time. In any case, they've raised the bar in terms of performance per-dollar. Isn't that a good thing for the end user? If it isn't appropriate for your use, such as if you can't buy the chips (RPi/2 soc), or the driver support is poor (my friend tells me that Allwinner is notorious for bad drivers for Linux), or the gpu support is poor (bbb), there are alternatives. It also looks like they are saying the hardware is fully open source. >From the specs it looks like it is in similar to the BBB in terms of performance and capabilities. Chris -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
