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A comment on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC. Parent comment

Re:Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC by JohnBooty on Monday November 02, 2020 @01:17PM (#24971193) 

    How many households in this situation have an extra monitor lying around to plug this into
You just need a television. In a single household it wouldn't even necessarily need to be an extra television, unless it's some kind of truly abusive household where the kid's not allowed to pre-empt the family TV to attend school.

Of course, in a multi-kid household, yes - one screen per kid would be needed.

    plus they'll need a separate webcam
Yes. Though, I'd be shocked if drivers were much of a hassle.

    This new Pi form factor is kinda clever but surely a
    $200-$300 chromebook or tablet is still significantly 
    more accessible.
Surely, but is the extra money more accessible?

    And how does a desktop enable more advanced STEM learning 
    than a laptop?
It's not the form factor. It's the OS. A fully-open OS, versus a locked-down OS.

Of course, whether or not this matters depends on the kid and the curriculum. If all the kid's doing is some web-based online curriculum whose needs are perfectly serviced by a Chromebook, then yeah - an RPi device isn't magically going to grant them magical STEM learning powers by osmosis.

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Re:Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC by cabalamat on Monday November 02, 2020 @02:29PM (#24972048)
> It's not the form factor. It's the OS. A fully-open OS, versus a locked-down OS.

Raspberry Pi 400 is what ChromeOS/Chromebooks could have been if Google cared about making computing empower people, rather than seeing it as a tool to manipulate them through adverts.

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Re:Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC by jolux on Monday November 02, 2020 @07:34PM (#24975090)
The locked down nature of the Chromebook is also (if not primarily) about security too.
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Re:Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC by AstroJetson on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:56PM (#24974473)
Oddly I was at Goodwill and picked up a RCA tv with an HDMI input for $20. It is only 18", but will do for the Pi 400 I grabbed today. Cheap used and still useful monitors are out there.
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