[moneytalks]

I was 100% with you until

> Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.

How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.

[blhack]

Because kids get them, don't do anything useful or fun with them, and conclude that engineering is not for them. They also eat up often-tight discretionary budgets for educational tools.

[sdinsn]

Pi's are dirt cheap, they aren't using up budgets.

[detaro]

> please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things

Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)

[sdinsn]

I know, the easy solution is to buy plain Pi's, not avoid Pi's altogether.

[blhack]

And what do you do with a plain pi that you couldn't do with an instance of Idle running on a desktop PC?

[sdinsn]

For example, if I want to create something to monitor and auto water my garden. I don't want to have a laptop sitting outside 24/7 or a line inside and require my desktop PC on 24/7.

[hartzell]

What is "Idle" (link?)? thanks!

[fapjacks]

But the photos on the webpage very clearly show that having a Pi-Top 4 makes you cool. And being cool is pretty useful.

[fapjacks]

Oh, I guess I forgot the /s