In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV. The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.

>In developed nations, I think families in poverty usually have a TV.

That was a fair assertion 1997. Nowadays you will easily find a bunch of computers too.

>The brilliance here is that a kid in a poor family can get started with just a single piece of hardware that's available cheaply.

$100 isn't cheap when you're poor.

A poor family that has any sense certainly won't buy brand-new hardware.

When you have to save money, you buy second-hand, which will allow you to buy a fairly modern PC with a magnitude more power than that raspberry PI at half the price.

For instance I could pick this computer up for 1 euro simply because someone wants to get rid of it:

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/pc-computer-acer...

You can find tons of offers like these if you'd browse your local ebay/craigslist/whatever listings.

Why would someone spend 100 bucks on a new machine?

> $100 isn't cheap when you're poor.

I meant if they somehow got ahold of one (community program, kind person from across town, local school getting rid of them, etc.). The discussion was more about whether a child in a poor family who gets one can actually use it without any extra hardware, not how affordable $100 is to a family in poverty.

Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids, much less the $100 it costs.

Right, the point is not that poor families can afford a $100 computer, rather that the poor family's school can buy more $100 computers to hand out than they can $200 Chromebooks or $400 iPads.

> Most parents in poverty don't have the brain space to think about buying one of these for their kids.

You're absolutely right, and that's why the pi foundation includes schools as a target market. Schools deliver the greatest, and certainly the most equally distributed, value, and cheap computers mean more money to spend on that brain space.

Because it comes with community, is relevant, etc...

Sure, smarter people can literally dumpster dive and get going. I literally did that as a kid. N9 big deal.

Tons of people will buy this and get a lot out of it.

> I literally did that as a kid.

Wicked, would love to hear the story.

I have two experiences to share. Watch this space. Maybe writing about good times is good therapy for what is otherwise a painful election...

No the parent, but I did this a bunch as we grew up poor. I got an oooooold IBM PS2 notebook with 6 Windows 3.1.2 floppies from the school IT discard pile. My friends and I also created the cheapest PC we could. It was a cardboard box with a small box fan and then all the Pentium 4 guts duct taped inside.

Awesome sauce. I'm an 80s kid so I basically had two rounds of this. I'll share later. But thanks for getting it started.

Very nice. I also had a box PC for a while, until my old man made me get rid of it as a fire hazard.

I guess you'd have to define poor. Many low-income families have things that cost $100 or more, like game consoles, tablets, phones...

Sure, but for a sense of scale about how badly wrong things can go even in “rich” countries like England, 17% of state educated kids get free school meals because food is too expensive: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54692880

My local rural school, its around 50%

I looked at it and immediately went "ZX Spectrum reborn". :)

I thought "BBC Micro". (We had two of them at school when I was about 12. The 4 AppleIIs were always in demand with a queue of people waiting to play games, there was almost _always_ one of the BBC Micros to play with if you wanted to type in Basic code...)

I thought Amiga A500... Especially with the name and form factor ;-)

That's the Next, but yes. Your parallel holds.

I agree, only would say Apple 2 or C64, Atari...

The reason that the old '80s microcomputers were often plugged into TVs was that monitors were too expensive. Sharing the TV with every other device and person in the house was a necessary evil. TV-hogging is probably about as problematic now as it was then, while displays are much less expensive. So including a screen makes much more sense for a low-cost access-to-computing device these days.

You're replying to a comment about kids trying to distance learning on their parents phone or without a desk. You're missing the point.

I am not. In the developed world there's comparatively little chance that a school district or national education system could afford about $100 per head for a rollout of RPi 400s but not the say $240 or so per head (being pretty conservative) for a rollout of clamshell devices instead. Especially since you'll make some of that $140 back just by avoiding the technical support costs of helping families get the computers working with a zoo of BYOD HDMI TVs. Meanwhile in the developing world the assumption that everyone has at least one HDMI HDTV at home goes out the window. The original comment mentioned a supply issue with Chromebooks, but it seems unlikely that something like the RPi 400 is going to be much more secure against supply disruptions than a clamshell laptop.

It's not so problematic today, there are multiple TVs in most families now. And old functioning, like, 1280*1024 LCD monitors can be had for free.

it's more likely an old keyboard is lying around. a Pi4 and cheap enclosure could then be picked up for half this price

An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.

And I'm talking about households that literally do not have computers. There is no old hardware lying around, much less not just a keyboard & mouse, but the HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card, etc. Sure, search craigslist or similar, ask friends/family, you might get by. That's not a scalable solution for 1,000 kids in my school district that lack resources, much less the thousands more in surrounding districts. As with many technical problems, scaling is a challenge, not the single one-off solution.

> An 8 year old kid with non-technical parents is not going to have an easy time of it compared to what is essentially a plug-and-play solution.

that's an entirely different argument, which I agree with you on. the original argument was that it's more likely a spare keyboard is lying around than a comparatively expensive monitor (which is more prone to being repurposed)

> mouse, .. HDMI adapter, SD card, ability to apply the Raspbian OS image to the SD card

these would still be required anyway, they're not included in the price

That's a pretty big exaggeration considering the 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B typically sells for $55-60. This adds a keyboard and case for $10-15 on top of that.

> $55-60

let's allow a more realistic $80 delivered

yes, it's a great price for a great piece of kit, don't get me wrong. but if the price is still an issue (as implied by free monitor), it shouldn't be a big exaggeration to expect to find a second hand Pi4 for $40-50

Adafruit $55 + $4.55 shipping

Amazon.com $59.43 + free shipping (1-day w/Prime)

PiShop.us $55 + $7.95 shipping

...so $60 seems very fair including shipping, not to mention this larger keyboard model will cost at least as much to ship.

Monitors last much longer than their desirability these days, there are hundreds of thousands of old clunky Dells just sitting around.

It does call for a bit of scrounging, but an acceptable used monitor should be twenty bucks or free. Including a screen is optimizing for pessimism: the best you could do is something useless for the majority, and only as good/cheap as the minority could get a new one for.

In this particular moment, it might not be so bad for many use cases -- school hours are usually times when people are working anyway, so it isn't as if parents will be sitting around watching TV. Plus, it isn't like the goal here is just to goof off and play games, the kid is 1) learning 2) distracted. Seems like a pretty good tradeoff.

I thought new trend is getting rid of TV's until so many visitors asked us "where's your tv!?".

You're talking about an entirely different group of people. Performative minimalism is not widely practiced among the groups werte discussing here.

Broadcast TV-watching may be going down to a large extent (and even Cable TV), but even some of the poorer families can get their hands on an old Wii, Xbox 360, or the like from a Goodwill.