>You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer.
Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash, a second hand X86 notebook(old beaten up Dell/Lenovo with an i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD) gives you way more power and flexibility with what you can boot, install and do with it, it's not even a competition. Not to mention it comes with a built in battery so you can carry it to school unlike a PI, and before someone sniggers and shows me a link with a Raspberry PI based notebook just to contradict me, ask yourselves if you would actually use that as a productivity daily driver for work and play vs a X86 laptop.
Sorry, even in developing nations, second hand notebooks/PCs are a way better deal in every way as a personal computer than a PI which is why PIs have never taken off as PCs and are still stuck in the hacker, tinkerer, learning, embedded, automation niches.
>Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ?
Why do they need to be closed? Having closed source software is no guarantee of quality nor security.
>Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though
By wanting more openness we don't mean reinventing the wheel and coding open source dialers from scratch, we mean we need Apple and Google to not lock their hardware to their appstores so we(companies, users, banks, developers and even governments) don't become prisoners to their walled gardens which is basically the current situation.
> and once you add a display, and peripherals you're looking at over $100
I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television), so the only peripherals you need are the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable, which together should be around USD 15 or even less (from a quick search for local prices here then converting to USD).
>I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television)
Sounds like a pretty poor assumption to me. In EU at least, over half the people I know own no television(TV tax is huge here and excluding boomers, nobody watches it anyway because Netflix) and if we assume all families in developing nations own a TV in the household then it would be difficult to do any productive type of work on it as the TV would probably be used a lot for, you know, watching TV and other entertainment rather than having it reserved just as a tool. Good luck writing your homework on your TV while your dad wants to watch his game and your mom her show.
Even in developing nations, second hand PCs are such affordable commodities that they're a no brainer.
It's definitely a thing here in Germany and Austria, and a relatively expensive one at that for just possessing a TV, and I'll bet my hat it's a thing in most EU countries.
Most EU countries you pay the tax regardless of owning a TV or not, it is part of the electricity bill or similar.
I have lived half of my life in Germany and still find it strange having GEZ, or whatever replaced it now, instead of everyone pays approach that most countries on the continent do.
In the case of the UK, the purpose of the Taxes is to pay for the programming that is broadcast over the airwaves, i.e. it funds the BBC.
This is somewhat of a 'compare and contrast' to the US Model, where either stations are funded by advertisements, or the public broadcasting stations that rely primarily on grants, as well as what they can get from the government; but in the case of the US, technically 'everyone' is paying into PBS whether they have a TV or not.
Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?
> Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?
Well, it's a question of which devil you want.
In the case of Disney, much of their profits are driven by an entire lifestyle that they are selling. There's the Media itself, but then all the toys, the amusement parks, etc. And all of the advertising that goes with those, and all of the social impacts it has as a result (see next point for more)
If you go for an advertising based model, You wind up with 2nd or 3rd order social impacts. Even in the 80s, the decade of 'greed is good', the FTC put limitations on advertising in children's programming due to the psychological impacts it had. (I'd be curious to see another good look taken today, but regulators are even more toothless now than they were then.)
In both cases, however, you are at the end of the day going to be beholden to either your advertisers, or your corporate overlords for your content. And if they don't like that content, it will not see the light of day in any meaningful form, regardless of the public interest.
I feel all approaches have their place, but perhaps the advertising model could use a bit more modernization in it's regulation, with what we now understand about behavioral psychology.
>Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?
Because why bother when you get money from free by law through taxes?
Count your blessings, as at least the BBC produces world class content viewed worldwide(former Top Gear, Dr. Who, etc) so you get your money's worth but in Germany, ARF and ZDF receive nearly as much money as the BBC but produce almost nothing worth watching by the Germans, let alone abroad, because why would they give a fuck when than sweet taxpayer money keeps rolling in no strings attached regardless.
They're not so lucky. In Spain the public broadcasters are paid from government grants from general taxation, so any tax payer pays towards it whether or not they have a TV and watch it.
In any case, you're right, most of Europe has TV licenses of some kind or other [1]
Thought notably in the UK, you can certainly own a TV without paying TV license [2]
OK, sure, "we got to the moon with 4Mhz" but try watching youtube, editng photos and google docs with that configuration.
What you probably mean by usable computer is either an embedded system or some ssh server but what most people actually do with computers is access the web and the modern web is so bloated that without fast hardware and proper software it becomes a pain to do anything remotely productive or fun.
That's why the PI is not yet a good mainstream PC. It's too slow sometimes and has too many gotchas that the users who are not tinkerers won't put up with.
YouTube plays fine on my 2020 laptop running Linux. The only feature I miss out on (that the hardware provides) is HDR, but it's a small loss for me to have my preferred development environment.
Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash, a second hand X86 notebook(old beaten up Dell/Lenovo with an i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD) gives you way more power and flexibility with what you can boot, install and do with it, it's not even a competition. Not to mention it comes with a built in battery so you can carry it to school unlike a PI, and before someone sniggers and shows me a link with a Raspberry PI based notebook just to contradict me, ask yourselves if you would actually use that as a productivity daily driver for work and play vs a X86 laptop.
Sorry, even in developing nations, second hand notebooks/PCs are a way better deal in every way as a personal computer than a PI which is why PIs have never taken off as PCs and are still stuck in the hacker, tinkerer, learning, embedded, automation niches.
>Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ?
Why do they need to be closed? Having closed source software is no guarantee of quality nor security.
>Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though
By wanting more openness we don't mean reinventing the wheel and coding open source dialers from scratch, we mean we need Apple and Google to not lock their hardware to their appstores so we(companies, users, banks, developers and even governments) don't become prisoners to their walled gardens which is basically the current situation.