[om-council] An opportunity for us with low-income people? (was Re: i586)

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer bero at lindev.ch
Mon Apr 25 08:02:51 EDT 2016


On 2016-04-25 12:22, Tomasz Gajc wrote:

> People with low income, buys Raspberry Pi 0,1 or 2
> 
> See only 5$ for a working computer
> http://www.microcenter.com/product/457746/Raspberry_Pi_Zero

Or this one for $9
http://getchip.com/pages/chip

There may actually be an opportunity for us in those kinds of devices.

The reality right now is that those boards are perfect computers for 
low-income people - they get essentially all they need from a computer 
(except the display, keyboard and mouse) at a price even the poorest can 
afford -- but at the same time, they have no idea about it because the 
computer shops they go into won't tell them because they want to make 
big $$$ selling a Microsoft box.
Instead of the low-income people, the guys ending up buying those 
less-than-$10 full computers are high-income tech people who want to 
have fun and do crazy things with them.

They also seem to be marketed way more for this type of use than as a 
computer for low income people (obviously - people working on them are 
just like us, they know how the tech world ticks, but they have not 
necessarily even met a really poor person in their lives).

If we can get OMLx to work well on one of those (I have a C.H.I.P. 
prototype, so can look into it a bit when Lx3 is done), there may be an 
opportunity to put it into a super-cheap but acceptable case, bundle 
with a cheap but ok keyboard and mouse (and possibly display, but that 
may be optional because most poor people have a TV they could use as 
output device) and just market it as a complete computer for those who 
can't afford to or don't want to shell out hundreds of $$$.

One concern is that they're low on memory (Pi 0 and C.H.I.P. are both 
limited to 512 MB RAM, not sure if they can run that many useful things 
even on top of LXQt).
But there's some options that are much better and still quite affordable 
(e.g. Pi 3, HiKey, DragonBoard 410c). And all of them are marketed 
towards tech people, not so much poor people in need of a computer.

So here's a question for the marketing team -- can we reach that group, 
or groups that want to help them? (Let's assume logistics are sorted 
out, I have "access" to people who are skilled enough to put a board 
into a case, put in an SD card, verify it boots, and mail it anywhere in 
the world.)

ttyl
bero



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