81–90 of 153 posts
I Hope it's more of games workshop type affair. You're just not going to have useful staff that know about this equipment long term operating a shop floor. You can barely get anyone that knows much about a phone beyond the box from phone specialists.
Hurry up and announce a Raspberry Pi 4 already! I want to give you more money
The rpi foundation are in trouble. The current SoC is old, limited at 1GB maximum RAM, and the GPU core is dated from 2011, 8 years ago. In my opinion they should severe ties with Broadloom and open up to global competition.
Interesting move, but why? Are they really planning to or currently selling to the general retail public?
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I agree with this sentiment, but I do think that the RPi Foundation is going to have a hard time improving from their current state without breaking backwards compatibility, because they made some decisions early on that no longer make much sense today. The big ones, in my opinion, are the write-limited, slow SD card interface, the microUSB power connector, the 1GB maximum RAM, Ethernet that shares bandwidth with USB…
"The education aspect (particularly as a low-level programming platform) would have been made more accessible without such an opaque boot process." Not that I disagree, but as a counterpoint learning programming with Scratch has very little to do with getting to know the implementation details of the underlying computational substrate. I'm a software professional and I can't bother with that stuff! I'm far more inter…
I don't by contrast program on my phone because it just feels like a gimmicky toy.
I'm not saying the raspberry pi is anything like a phone in this regard, but in does have a limit to how far you can dig, and that's a real shame.
Is it limiting to the scratch programmers? Probably not, but the Scratch programmers read about and move on Python, who then move on C. But if the boot process isn't open, there isn't anyone to write about it, so people don't discover it. Which for an educational endeavour is problematic.
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Yeah. Brand-wise, I would rather see the Raspberry Pi shop like a kind of bazaar where you find everything in all sorts of places rather than a very tidy and clean place where everything is in order. The "everything should look like what Apple does" is really tiring and generic these days.
The "RPi is for nerds" shtick is specifically what they're probably trying to get rid of with that store. Looking approachable is a pretty key component of that. Doesn't really look like an Apple Store either, unless wood and white is now reserved for Apple...
Agreed, the other key component though is actually making their machine and software/hardware approachable, smooth, performant and reliable. Which they haven't really put any effort in to since they started.
I really wanted the dream of an affordable computer for kids to be a reality but at the end of the day when the $35 just isn't as performant as a budget tablet around the same price then kids are going to just end up with tablets and never have the opportunity to crack the machine open.
If the product doesn't live up to the sales pitch of the store, then the product is just going to get returned.
Perhaps this is in reaction to Maplin’s troubles? That would previously have been the only place I would have thought of to buy a Raspberry Pi on the high street.
It would be ace to be able to walk into a RPi shop and be able to purchase LEDs, resistors, OLED screens, ESP8266 modules, breadboards etc. Maplin was a great shop and open on the weekends was often a lifesaver.
I think charging x10 what a product would cost on eBay is reasonable. But often you’d be charged x100 to x1000 times more for cheap components (resistors etc.). I mostly ended up buying larger packs of parts which might come in handy, because I didn’t want to be overcharged to that degree.
I wouldn’t mind so much if they stocked good quality soldering irons (e.g. Hakko) or good quality hand tools. But they didn’t.
It’s a shame there are no good electronics high street shops left, but I’m not particularly sad to see Maplin go personally.
I had a minute to check it out over lunch - most of the floorspace is dedicated to demonstrating what the raspberry pi can do at a high level. They had stations for coding, gaming, sensors, etc. but only ~1/4th of the space was devoted to inventory. While they have a decent selection of Pis, sensor kits, and accessories, it's definitely not a replacement for Maplin. Additionally, Already__Taken seems to have been cor…
If you had a physical place where you could source sticker-price raspberry pis it would already be quit good.
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I believe they're trying to market to the general public. If Apple stores are good at turning heads from how they are designed, then it makes sense to apply that design to their own store. It's about getting people inside.
I see what you're saying, but don't you then run the risk of people not understanding what they're buying. It's ok selling it like an iphone, but if people are expecting an iphone, they're going to be disappointed. Apple branding, stores and USP all kind of complement each other in that minimalist 'just works' feel. Raspi isn't that.