[hannofcart]

Yeah, I wish the governments in India and Nepal would provide some subsidies to incentivize companies to manufacture boards like to RPi which as far as I understand have open specifications.

Giving a RPi to a family without resources in India is a force multiplier. They typically have a small television set and letting them access a proper computer vitalizes learning for the children of that household.

I only have anecdotal evidence of this though, from when I handed an RPi I wasn't using to my housekeeper's daughter and also got her a 3g dongle with a cheap data plan for her to connect to the internet. It got handed down from her to her brothers as well.

[valleyer]

Sadly, Raspberry Pi can't be manufactured by third parties, since Broadcom doesn't sell the SoCs to the public.

There are some other ARM SBCs listed here, but I'm not familiar with them enough to know whether they're good substitutes. (Hopefully the "Banana Pi" is?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_computing_...

[soneil]

I was going to explain that the only difference between the raspberry pi & generic pi is the support that comes from having the mindshare/marketshare. But honestly, I think in the scope of the real issue it's mostly bike-shedding.

If you want to deliver a million Pi to the subcontinent, the real problem isn't the dollar difference between the various SBC. If you compare a Pi to a phone, you also have to bring ..

- Power; not just the obvious, but also that the onboard battery on a phone brings a high tolerance for supply issues.

- Screen; preferably enough of a screen to make the outlay worth it. If you just put a phone screen on a pi, what did you really gain?

- Connectivity; particularly the last mile where the phone has near-infinite flexibility.

Of course none of these are remotely difficult (although connectivity can be difficult remotely), but they're all BOM cost that end up making the SBC one of the least interesting parts to solve. For most the Pi-based laptops & Tablets I've seen, the Pi itself is ballpark 10% of the overall cost.

I think if I was going to attempt this (and to be clear, I use that phrase entirely in the 'armchair quarterback' scope), I'd be trying to create a terminal that's essentially a phone dock - because this isn't going to be an either/or purchase, no-one's going to give up their phone to get this terminal instead. So instead of using all your BOM trying to recreate what they already have, concentrate on what they're missing.

[a9h74j]

Also an armchair quarterback, but yes, to me one of the great mentionable intellectual/ecological "crimes" is the non-updateability of billions of phones. We don't have infinite retries at using physical resources on the scale we have.

That said, I haven't looked at how many tools work all the way back to much older versions of Android.

[kewrkewm53]

Pi is nice, but also used hardware would do the job. At least in Western countries old Core2 Duo business desktops are basically worthless by now, and such laptops don't exactly cost much either. Why not export more of those and get some more years out of them before recycling? They are perfectly adequate for learning to program.

[AussieWog93]

I've met people before who do exactly that. Margins aren't huge, but it's profitable for people in both countries.

[randomperson_24]

A big problem I have seen with Pi in India is that it overheats and throttles heavily because the the temperature is usually high. With additonal cost of a good power supply, monitor, HDMI cable, its not worth it.

IMO a better device will be a laptop ~ 80 USD with an ARM processor and basic specs - especially a good in-built speaker.