Lets say you did. You launch it, people are excited, they start using it.
But stuff will evolve, people will want to innovate. So they make new hardware, and they make new libraries because lets face it, chances you get everything right the first time is slim to none.
And after a few years you're back to having backwards compatibility issues, and some years after that you're starting to feel the mismatch between hardware and software again etc.
As for cheaper, consider this. You can get an ATX motherboard with lots of functionality most people won't use, for like $50 or so. In low quantities just the PCB alone, just empty tracks with no components would be much more than that.
In a number of ways this echoes the early microcomputer industry (thinking the 1970s-80s), when dozens of competing and incompatible standards existed. Atari, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, just to name a few. And as the industry neared middle age in the 1990s, shopping for a "PC Clone" was a cornucopia of options: a copy of PC Shopper was hundreds of pages thick, each with ads for "custom made" PC clones "built to your specifications". Lead times of weeks, hundreds of case, motherboards, CPU, RAM and Video card options existed... and prices were in the $2000+. Now it's settled down to a few big players who essentially sell poorly-differentiated commodity items for paper-thin margins. It is to be expected as an industry matures.
A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.
It's probably the right move financially. People love to pay more for less. Prebuilt desktop, server and cloud companies have built businesses around that concept.
The average person is undereducated and easily parted from their money. It's a lot easier to make a bad product that appeals to them and get half the market for free than it is to make a good product and try to appeal to the best.
The problem here is most people want new. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they're thinking of everyone buying one.
I've been looking at making a NAS box and it would cost less than 200 Euros for decent hardware (better than some QNAP, including a 10Gbps fiber adapter and Wifi) and a completely custom aluminum case.
Hmm, consider that you haven't spent any money on a computer in 4 years. Look at the 'health' of the computer companies like HP, Dell, Acer, etc.
The problem here is a bit more insidious than you might assume at first glance. The reason you can buy a motherboard for $100 which has close to a thousand individual components soldered to a 16 layer board is because a manufacturer invested tens of millions of dollars in a highly automated manufacturing line that could turn out millions of them a month, and all the connectors on them had injection molds made because billions of connectors would be needed, and testing companies built amazing bed-of-nails testers that can run 25,000 tests on that board.
When I was at NetApp our partners built systems for us (so called ODMs) to our specifications but in the thousands, not the millions, and our motherboards that had a similar complexity to the ones that Gigabyte or ASUSTek could sell cost us $800 each. Smaller runs, those in the hundreds, are like $2,500 to $3,000 each.
The lack of buying is taking the oxygen out of the system. These guys are cutting costs where they can, but there will come a time in your lifetime where buying a cost effecting "PC" class machine out of parts will be very very hard to do, they just won't have the volume. A new TV with similar smarts? Still cheap. But a desktop machine?
They call them economies of scale, when there is a scale, when there isn't they don't work so well. Factories in China are starting to switch over to making systems for server farms, not individuals. Amazon, Google, Microsoft might by 50,000 at a time. You and I, not so much.
We are on the leading edge of that change. I have a sense that it is going to be a fairly dramatic change.
I think that's an optimistic interpretation. The "early adopter" tax people pay for the first version of something works for no-other-options devices (think the first HDTV's or Blu-Ray players). In this case however, just about can go to Microcenter and build a better-performing machine for significantly cheaper. The form factor or power consumption may not be as good, but I'm not entirely sure how much that matters compared to several hundred dollars of up-front savings?
Even in computers, you had the dilemma of "should I buy now, or wait a year and get the same thing for less money?" That was a standard question for many years.
Yes, exactly that. The typical PC motherboards start at $100, and have so since the 90ies. Just one of those, with a socket for their cpu and a translated bios just good enough to bootstrap Linux should not be so much more expensive. Even if they had to sell it at cost it would be worth spreading the technology.
No I get that. But once you get to a certain point an ecosystem develops where you have small game Devs who would probably want a nicer computer, you have the small business owner / parent who learnt to use the computer, has a bit more to spend, has a legitimate use and is willing to spend a bit more.
Even if the price quadrupled if someones relying on that hardware, and the keyboard makes their job easier, it seems it would sell.
Plus, compared to the 90s £285 is cheap. I wish my computer's were that cheap back then. My first computer was over £500 (so what £1000 today?) and it wasn't top of the line, and I had to put it together myself.
I wouldn't bother with building one myself, either; it's a huge time investment, not to mention the art of thermal paste application, cuts from sharp motherboard edges, and losing my BIOS settings to static electricity (although I totally appreciated the end-result of being able to upgrade my CPU and Windows accepting the hardware upgrade, bless Microsoft).
My assertion was more about the huge number of other people that seem enthused about it.
Yes, it's an expensive paperweight by the time you have it.
But we can sex it it up a bit: probably the people who would love to have this system to run Linux on haven't figured out yet that there is GOLD on those circuit boards. Lots of it!!
I've been thinking about building a new machine based on the latest hardware but prices are still high. If they let prices drop a little the demand might be there.
I like assembling my own stuff as in micro-controllers and breadboards and things where complexity can be removed by looking at a wiring schematic. I absolutely hate assembling my own stuff as in plugging in an AMD R9 270 and fitting an Intel Core i7 and finding RAM that's compatible with your motherboard and plugging in SATA cables and making sure your case fans are blowing the right way to get proper airflow and figuring out how much of a power supply you need. The only challenge that offers is in selecting compatible parts, and the only reward is having something exactly the same as the person next to you who bought his pre-built.
I'm not surprised to see PC building going away. It's a high risk, low reward enterprise, especially considering that modern games haven't push the minimum spec envelope much further than what you can play on a Macbook Air. Building a PC is like Lego, where the pieces only fit together in one specific way, and each piece costs $250. The good part doesn't start until the building is done and you get into the software.
But there will always be a place for actual hardware tinkerers, the ones who need multimeters and solder and flux. Even if it is a niche.
No, Talos is certainly not a cheap board, but I believe it was clearly intended by its developer to proverbially break ground for a new ecosystem that wasn't vendor-controlled--with increased adoption, these would undoubtedly get cheaper and better down the line.
While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence in the long-term.
And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip), and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86 counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison.
Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting?
But stuff will evolve, people will want to innovate. So they make new hardware, and they make new libraries because lets face it, chances you get everything right the first time is slim to none.
And after a few years you're back to having backwards compatibility issues, and some years after that you're starting to feel the mismatch between hardware and software again etc.
As for cheaper, consider this. You can get an ATX motherboard with lots of functionality most people won't use, for like $50 or so. In low quantities just the PCB alone, just empty tracks with no components would be much more than that.
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