[jeez444]

Agreed. This is yet another product that will appeal to techies and first adopters only.

For instance, people could -- in theory -- build their own computers with a bunch of modular components, but instead a lot of them buy a Mac or some other variation of all-in-one solution.

[DCKing]

It's different. With computers, you pick your own motherboard, CPU, GPU, memory config and so on. These things look funny and technical and most people don't even touch them. But even casual users regularly replace/expand their displays, storage (I'm counting external hard drives) and laptop batteries.

With this project, your SoC - which is your CPU, motherboard, networking, memory and baseband chip all in one - is still just one package. Yet you can easily supplement other varieties of packages for displays, storage, batteries, cameras. Each of these things are quite well understood by many casual users.

[venomsnake]

And gamers ...

http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/ and with the influx of new people in PC gaming with self build rigs - the custom PC market is quite healthy right now.

[dlp211]

And it is also very niche. The custom PC market has been, and will continue to be a "healthy" market, but it is by no means a growing market. The difference between a custom built PC, and a modular designed phone, is that for the most part, a static device, that is, it doesn't go anywhere, versus a phone, which will be abused just by the nature of the fact that it is a mobile phone (I mean the presentation is proof of this, the phone broke the day before).

Now am I saying that there is no market for this, absolutely not, but this in no way will become the standard for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one to me, is time. I used to build all my PC's, taking the time to compare parts, read reviews, check out overclockability, and look for deals and get the best bang for my buck, but as I have gotten older, I just want a machine that works, my disdain for everything Apple, has completely turned around, I absolutely love my Macs now, not because I think Apple and Steve are gods gift to computing, but because they work, they maintain resale value, and compared to PC hardware, they are superior.

[leoc]

Than again, a lot of them do self-build. Even if this system is only good enough to attract techies and enthusiasts, that might be enough to give it a viable market.