there's a war goin' on

Post date: Feb 29, 2016 3:57:39 PM

The big news of course is the Pi 3. The thing that impresses me the most about it isn't the WiFi, but that they kept the same price as the 2. I guess they're serious about following Eric Schmidt's advice about not making the Pi more expensive.

I've been thinking about it, and there's a real competition to see who can make the least amount of money in the small computer market. (CHIP, Pine64, etc.) Or that's the way it seems. You have to be a pretty big player to make a profit. That would be the Raspberry Pi foundation. I think without the Foundation being a non-profit this whole phenomenon wouldn't have happened. My guess is if you were optimizing for maximum profit instead of maximum units the price point would be closer to $70, not $35.

Anyway, we all benefit, right?

I also checked the prices at the various vendors. The UK vendors all want more than $34 for it, or are charging a lot for shipping. In the US, Adafruit has their normal $5 markup. The only one that's charging $35 is Newark, but they're out of stock at the moment. Traditionally they've had reasonable shipping charges, so I'll probably order from them in a few months.