3 ms·

> When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If you can spend (just) a month or two de

> When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If you can spend (just) a month or two designing, debugging, and procuring a cost-optimized variant of this that costs $25 instead, your time spent on that is equivalent to just buying a thousand of these. One of the big things in the "it depends" question is how many of these things you plan to sell. If it's less than thousands, buy modules.

opencl 9y ago
The problem is that there are a dozen Chinese companies that have already designed, debugged, and produced a cost-optimized variant of this for less than half the price. The Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 for example has the exact same SoC, same 8GB MMC, Wifi/BT, and is $20. Not saying that this board necessarily isn't worth it but clearly there is stiff competition in the SBC space and a lot of the boards are extremely cheap. The size is an advantage. It has mezzanine connectors instead of rows of headers. They claim they'll actually keep the kernel up to date which is a major problem with many of these SBCs, though I am rather skeptical given that they're using Allwinner chips. They cannot magically produce a new kernel without sources from Allwinner.
nsb1 9y ago
It's a fair point. I deal in consumer electronics, and my company needs to make money, so I tend to think in terms of hundreds of thousands of units. I'm not sure how a company can even be profitable selling thousands of units unless they each cost thousands of dollars. When you get up into those prices, though, it feels (at least to me) like you're beyond embedded-class SOM devices like this. I guess if I could make a $100 device and sell it for $1000, I would. Maybe Apple would hire me... [ Disclaimer: I own an iPhone ]

3 ms·

> When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If you can spend (just) a month or two de

by LeifCarrotson 9y ago

opencl 9y ago
The problem is that there are a dozen Chinese companies that have already designed, debugged, and produced a cost-optimized variant of this for less than half the price. The Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 for example has the exact same SoC, same 8GB MMC, Wifi/BT, and is $20. Not saying that this board necessarily isn't worth it but clearly there is stiff competition in the SBC space and a lot of the boards are extremely cheap. The size is an advantage. It has mezzanine connectors instead of rows of headers. They claim they'll actually keep the kernel up to date which is a major problem with many of these SBCs, though I am rather skeptical given that they're using Allwinner chips. They cannot magically produce a new kernel without sources from Allwinner.
nsb1 9y ago
It's a fair point. I deal in consumer electronics, and my company needs to make money, so I tend to think in terms of hundreds of thousands of units. I'm not sure how a company can even be profitable selling thousands of units unless they each cost thousands of dollars. When you get up into those prices, though, it feels (at least to me) like you're beyond embedded-class SOM devices like this. I guess if I could make a $100 device and sell it for $1000, I would. Maybe Apple would hire me... [ Disclaimer: I own an iPhone ]