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

Kate Lebedeff kate at lebedeff.co.uk
Mon Apr 25 08:12:21 EDT 2016


Copied some parts to “i586 post”:)

as for if we can do smth with it - let’s take it one by one.. We have now pending very important and ambitious laptop project - we should finish that one successfully before we engage ourselves anywhere else:)



> On 25Apr, 2016, at 14:02, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero at lindev.ch> wrote:
> 
> 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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