Details About Raspberry Pi Foundation's $25 PC

First time accepted submitter salcan writes "There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We've seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November this year. Eben Upton, director of the foundation, recently gave a talk at Bletchley Park regarding Educating Programmers, which focused on the thinking behind the $25 PC."

Re:Less than a "PC"

[wolfie123]

So, when i unplug my peripherals from my computer case, it ceases to be a PC? Whoa. Radical, dude.

Re:Cost of a textbook?

[TheRaven64]

or that Mensa has really low standards

If you've only just realised that, you've never met a Mensa member before. It's a club for people who define themselves by their intelligence, yet are so insecure about said intelligence that they require affirmation by membership of a club that is `exclusive' to people who manage to get a rather mediocre score on a fairly trivial test.

Unfair comparison

[JBHarris]

The Raspberry Pi hardware doesn't do the same things as the OLPC does. The Raspberry doesn't include an form of input or output as part of the reference hardware. So, at that point we are basically selling a computing core, ram, and some storage for $25. If the students need monitors, mice & keyboards at each location, they may as well just carry around a USB thumb stick with a custom LiveOS and put the Pi or other processing core at the work station. That sounds a LOT like my son's middle school.

Missing the point...

[YenRug]

From what I can read, so far, nearly all of the commenters are missing the point. This is not intended as a "cheap PC" option in the same way that OLPC was meant to get laptops into the hands of third-world children; if you read up on it, it's intention is for use as a "standard platform" for learning programming techniques in a limited environment. People like David Braben grew up learning to write extremely efficient code because they had such limited memory to work with, such as the Sinclair ZX80/ZX81 which only had 16KB (NOT a typo, that's KB, not MB), the Acorn/BBC B with 32KB and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48KB. There is a general feeling that current students are getting "sloppy" and presume they're always going to have GB's of memory to stretch out in, so they've created PI to encourage creative thinking without placing too much demand on the wallets of students.