Soldered RAM is always a wrong choice in a PC.

The icons on this release are mostly horrible. I replaced the finder with the one from a previous version and will probably replace the bright folder icons. I like the gray sidebar icons in finder and wish they had used full size versions instead of the horrible bright blue.

"I'm not wasting any more time chasing your moving goal posts" I didn't move the goal posts. Everyone talking about inflation is trying to do that. The under $200 category of programmable computer is gone. We now have smart phones and tablets. One of the key entry points into computing is no longer available.

Maybe. If the pushes are in the right direction it gradually moves the overall discussion in the way you want it to go.

Yes. I bought one for my daughter (11) and one for an older person who kept getting her laptop pwn3d. Given the number of parents/grandparents that no longer have the time or ability to have a stable system and just want a browser, this is the perfect solution for them.

I've had a few failures (Kreyos and the Neal Stephenson sword game) but the rest of about two dozen have given me exactly what they promised and I got some really nice items.

Libertarians claim that bad business practices will force bad companies out of business allowing good companies to prosper, but any time a person buys a product from a 'bad' vendor is their own fault for not doing enough research.

I don't buy that inflation argument at all since cellphones (and a lot of consumer items) still go for the $99 and $199 price points. Computers were always touted as getting cheaper every year, yet (because of the economics of Intel and Microsoft) we have lost the under $200 segment. $500 is still not an impulse buy.

Perhaps, and maybe that's the problem. I'm sure they're growing at a really rapid rate. If you grow like that for 10 years, there's going to be a lot of amortized expenses that will catch up if you're growing that quickly every year.

ZX Spectrum and its ilk were buy box in store, come home and hook to TV. The Raspberry Pi is not that simple and even amazon lists a bunch of pictures of parts with each entry. That is a pretty big "too hard" for a nontechnical parent.

Go to the Raspberry Pi website and try to figure out from the point of view of a nontechnical parent how to buy your kid a complete computer they can program. That project is not ready for the retail crowd.

None of those are prime-time ready for parent who don't know anything about computers. Last time I checked, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target are still around.

when libertarians get treated the way they'd treat others in a libertarian utopia.

Caveat emptor.

If this were Amazon vs. rinkydink provider, I'd buy that. When it's Google vs. Amazon vs. Microsoft, they have the resources to slug this out for as long as they want.

In the late 70's and early 80's in the US, you could go into a big box store and buy a computer with BASIC for under $200. Heck, the Sinclair boxes were under a $100. Which computer fits that description today?