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InevitableAd5222 t1_j8cz5zp wrote

Reply to comment by extra_specticles in Open-Source, RISC-V Laptop Will Be Easy to Make and Upgrade by Avieshek

What??? Tech enthusiast market is HUGE and enthusiasts love the idea of an open source standard like RISC-V w/ easy to fix/upgrade hardware for learning. Have you seen all the RISC-V posts on hacker news? Plus just look at Raspbery Pi demand.

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BumderFromDownUnder t1_j8d4kr7 wrote

Enthusiast market isn’t huge at all. It’s literally the smallest out of the available markets. Corporate/business and “normal” user markets considerably dwarf “enthusiasts”

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InevitableAd5222 t1_j8d8rbr wrote

There are other larger / more mainstream markets but that does not diminish the money to be made/relevance of enthusiast tech. Raspberry Pi had 95.82 million GBP revenue. It is not Windows, but idk why people are saying it will "fade into non existence V Quickly". It is an open source spec not some new Phone, so how mainstream it is doesn't even seem like an applicable critique. This is a niche group of people so the market is not as big. It is like saying Ubuntu is not relevant.

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BostonDodgeGuy t1_j8dmxsp wrote

> Raspberry Pi had 95.82 million GBP revenue.

Do you have a source on that? Highest I saw after a quick googling was 71m. Though, that's revenue and not profit. Twitter makes a ton of revenue but no profit for example.

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tastyratz t1_j8dpnbt wrote

> Raspberry Pi had 95.82 million GBP revenue

Raspberry Pi makes a lot of their money selling to businesses for commercial use.

A small powerful lightweight power efficient computing device is of course very popular to install in many kinds of equipment, not just makers.

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Diablojota t1_j8ddkpi wrote

That’s a very niche market with those revenues in the tech space. Not saying they won’t do well, but it’ll come down to price. It won’t succeed if it doesn’t align with the niche market at a price they’re willing to pay in terms of features and benefits. The question will be, so they get enough sales to get the scale necessary to make this cost effective.

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Gschu54 t1_j8dqug4 wrote

Right, edge computing. Very different than desktop/laptop.

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extra_specticles t1_j8d3151 wrote

Yes, the market is POTENTIALLY huge - but without major h/w & OS vendor support it's not going to be massive. The open desktop market has only existed in part due to the fact that (A) the h/w was always open right back to the original IBM PC, and (B) OS/software support for a large number so hardware components. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see it, but I've been in the tech industry for over 40 years and I'm not going to hold my breath.

PI Demand - even then the pi was available (and it's coming back online for Q3 this year) the number of laptops with it? You might think the appeal of such hardware configurations is high, but without mainstream OEM hardware vendors (DELL, LENOVO etc) they will not succeed in the consumer and business markets. What will make it happen is if Windows introduces a version for it. This of course is a possibility - however, Microsoft will need to come up with something like Apple's Rosetta for ARM to enable x86 apps to run. Again this is not something that they can't do - but they've certainly not been able to do it for their ARM Windows yet.

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InevitableAd5222 t1_j8dbps6 wrote

Ten years after the first Raspberry Pi was shipped in 2012, more than 40 million of the devices have been sold worldwide, creating a market worth in excess of $1 billion, plus more in peripherals

-https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/raspberrypi

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extra_specticles t1_j8esig7 wrote

The original post is not about SBC it's about modular laptops. No one is saying riscv SBC would not be a big market. The whole thread was about laptops and their marketplace.

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Gschu54 t1_j8drh6h wrote

Rpi's and the rest of the single board computers are basically cell phones. They are not really close to being laptops.

Hell I have sbcs with literal cell phone processors and the os that's packaged for it is an AOSP variant, not a native Linux variant.

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InevitableAd5222 t1_j8d9ry1 wrote

I agree with 90% of that, at least about how applicable to broader market it will be. But look at Arch and Slackware. Tech like RISC-V can exist SOLELY from communities and still end up becoming worth a lot of money. Like RedHat lots of money. Also about Pi: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/raspberrypi (that is a MASSIVE market to any startup founder) Saying that 1 billion usd is failure in consumer market is just not true.

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Also asking how many laptops with Pi is not the right question, people wanted it as its own little SOC motherboard not in a laptop. Putting the single board in a laptop kinda defeats the whole tinkering purpose and how would they expose GPIO pins? A laptop for the pi is just a case with a keyboard and built-in monitor, most people in this niche would rather just keep the easier physical access and use external monitor + SSH.

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yapyd t1_j8d5k15 wrote

How many laptops have you seen with Linux (excluding chromebooks)?

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InevitableAd5222 t1_j8d8cu8 wrote

Most corp latops I worked on ran Linux. Every computer at Google I saw ran Linux or OSX. All of my personal laptops including the laptop I wrote this comment on (System76: https://system76.com/).

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jwkdjslzkkfkei3838rk t1_j8f6qyq wrote

Most of our Indian collagues run Linux on their Thinkpads. I don't know how widespread it is in India, but even a few percent is a lot of laptops, when Hyderabad alone has 6 times as much people working in IT as Silicon Valley.

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[deleted] t1_j8dg65g wrote

Look at how thick that thing is. No one will want to use it. Will probably be very hard to even find a bag that supports it.

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