I had to laugh

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I was reading the Google+ feed for the Raspberry Pi, and saw this question:

:smiley:

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Your kidding me right? I don’t think I could imagine a more incorrect and expensive application for a Raspberry Pi then this, but this is what happens with over the top marketing and branding, you get the less then Tech savvy thinking its a solution to every problem, exactly the opposite problem with Gadgeteer where you have harden Tech experts who have never heard of it, but when they do, they can think of all sorts of applications for it.

Get Granny a Surface or an iPad and make her happy.

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@ andre.m - I know what you will be giving your grandmother for Christmas.

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Android on Raspberry Pi, one wonders why this wouldn’t be quite similar to iPad (except of course that it’d be a much lower investment, even accounting for screen and peripherals…).

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That’s interesting: slapping a 10 point multitouch lcd screen onto a PI would make it a tablet right? One think I could never figure out is how do they produce the thing so cheaply at $35 when a Cerbuino Bee is $40?!

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2 reasons:

[ol]Extremely high volume. Stuff gets a lot cheaper when you’re making millions of them.
Broadcom (who makes the SoC) might be subsidizing the SoC[/ol]

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I bet they did not pay for the CPU!!

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Volume and Not for Profit make sense. Also the subsidies could be a possibility; but why? Would boardcom forego profits just for PI? Is it an attempt to blow away all other embedded processors? [EDIT]The fact that you can’t buy the PI in mass makes me think that it is a strange loss leader technology.[EDIT] Sorry you can buy it in mass.

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I saw it said somewhere that Broadcom was selling the CPU at a loss, but Ebon Upton (who works for Broadcom) said: “Broadcom is making money. All of the components are purchased on commercial terms, were not subsidized.”

http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/05/many-tens-of-thousands-35-raspberry-pi-computers-have-been-ordered-interview/#gEb684I2mWU2BGc6.99

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More info… a foundation member wrote this on the forum:

That was June 2012, and I’m sure numbers have only gone up from there. So they’re getting a large volume price, one they (at least in the beginning) didn’t have the volume to justify, but they ARE paying “normal” prices for it. It all comes down to volume.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=9181&p=107393