| From: mwilson--- via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | "Aruna Hewapathirane via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | > Some of the fruit named Pi boards have hardware specs way better as well | > but price is very affordable. | > I am wondering why the price is so low compared to the Raspberry Pi ? Or | > are we simply paying for the Raspberry brand name ? | | I think it's the usual Chinese manufacturing cost advantage. Sure. And subsidized shipping. It is often cheaper to mail from China or Hong Kong than from within Toronto. And engineering short-cuts: - once one of those inexpensive boards are built and sort of work, no fixes are released - Often one version of Ubuntu is made to run and that's it. It is custom (because booting every board is different; DTree has helped but not fixed the problem). It's rarely updated. - drivers are never upstreamed by the board-maker or the SoC maker. Sometimes by volunteer reverse engineers (eg. linux-sunxi.org) - there is no support except by enthusiasts - no approvals by UL, CSA, DoC, FCC, ... It is also handy that most work on the Raspberry Pi is in a language I understand.