* * *

I knew real science stars who ran Mathematica on 486 with huge success. But that's a different story. This project targets hobbyists and kids educating themselves and this normally involves watching YouTube tutorials/lectures and googling information up. For some people this can be good and teach them patience, for many this will be an obstacle and divert them to alternatives. Mathematica is great but has keep the competition in mind. I am afraid it will decline heavily sooner or later.

So they don't cannibalize their institutional sales at universities.

Sure, that's why I say not just non-commercial but also individual.

People at the university would just 'individual' download it for non-commercial use.

> can't even navigate YouTube comfortably

None of my devices can.

With cli tools / invidious it's always fine though, so I guess the website is just painful by design, both for humans and computers.

Without a Raspberry Pi, at least you can use the wolfram engine for free [0] and integrate with your applications, although without all the benefits of the wolfram notebooks environment.

[0] https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

As long as your application is not commercial.

Indeed, but I believe that if one develop a commercial application that uses Wolfram language then they would think it is worth to pay for it.

... it was painfully slow on the original Raspberry Pi, but it is usable on the Pi 4. You probably wouldn't want to use it for serious work or even serious course work (e.g. post secondary), but it does demo the product and is fine for high school level math. The biggest hurdle is the startup time and, depending upon how patient you are, visualization.

You should be able to view a YouTube video on a Pi 4 with enough RAM, while running Mathematica in another window. With the newer hardware the performance problems should only come if you try to use 4k video or something.