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Re:Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer by sangnoir on Thursday November 26, 2015 @05:08AM (#10632260)
Olimex alleged[1] that the '$9' CHIP was being sold at a loss (which I guess is par for the course for a Kickstarter project).

>The Pi has not actually been all that cheap lately compared to the competition.

I'm not a big fan of the RPi Foundation & it's relationship with BroadCOMM, but which competition are you referring to? I tried searching for RPi-like boards a while back but only came up with HardKernel & the bananaPi, and I don't think either is a proper competitor.

1. https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-ne...

Re:Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer by makomk on Thursday November 26, 2015 @05:43AM (#10632363)
The Orange Pi PC is competing fairly directly with the Pi 2, for $15. (Though it does apparently have some thermal throttling issues and isn't yet supported by the upstream Linux kernel without patches.) Annoyingly so in some ways; they haven't bothered to pin out many SoC features that the Pi lacks, like line-in support.

Oh, and that Olimex article smells of FUD. As they themselves point out, the price they were quoted for the SoC in the C.H.I.P. wouldn't be competitive - it's the same as a modern quad core SoC for a outdated single core. It's not a new die either, just another (possibly repackaged) version of the old and cheap Allwinner A13, so there's little in the way of R&D costs to recoup.