I'm not sure about the barrier to entry. Sure, buying a computer is much cheaper, but the things you can do have been intentionally restricted - there's an enti

I'm not sure about the barrier to entry. Sure, buying a computer is much cheaper, but the things you can do have been intentionally restricted - there's an entire industry thriving on artificial unefficiency - the sort of thing that computers were meant to obviate. Imagine a teenager wanting to search for & automatically "like" Facebook pages about their favorite band. Where would you even start, considering Facebook intentionally makes that difficult with fear-mongering about "security" and lays traps that will ban your account if they detect automated activity? Same with all the other mainstream services. It's much harder nowadays to make computers do anything "useful" when everything is intentionally siloed into proprietary apps & services that intentionally prevent interoperability. > For that reason I'm buying each of my kids a Pi for their 10th birthday I'd suggest getting them an older laptop with good Linux support - a dual-core/4GB RAM ThinkPad can be obtained for relatively cheap and has the advantage that it's still very similar to modern computers especially early on in the boot process (x86 as opposed to the Pi's ARM architecture) so any low-level skills they'd learn while breaking & fixing it would also apply to most computers out there.