Granted prices have gone up by 50% in the last year or two.

$1000? I don't think so. Beelink sells lots of windows 11 mini computers with 16 GB ram and pitiful SSDs (256-512) for under $300 USD. These computers run Linux quite well. I have several in my home lab. For me they work so much better than Pis for non-embedded, server-type work.

If you want truly open source hardware then RISCV is the future.

Unfortunately this is a common misconception. RISCV is not open source in any way that slashdotters recognize. When they say RISC V is "open" all it means is that you can implement a chip design with the RISC V ISA without a license. That's literally the only practical difference between it and ARM.

If you want to use an existing RISC V core in your own custom chip and don't want to make your own core, all cores available now are fully proprietary and must be licensed. Furthermore all the important bits such as the GPU are completely proprietary. So you still need proprietary firmware blobs. Also most cores implement extensions to the ISA which are proprietary.

Cranking out microcontrollers for pennies is neat but it doesn't make it open source.

From an end user point of view, and also Linux support, there's no advantage to RISC V over ARM. They both really suck, frankly.

The Pi 5s I've been buying (Cana kit) have gone from $299 to $349 in the last year or two. Not nearly as much increase as most computers.

Unsoldering the ram chips and replacing them takes some effort and skill, and then you end up paying for 2 sets of ram chips - the old ones (which you cant do anything with) and the new ones. Given the effort and cost involved, this is only worth doing if:

1) the higher ram model is heavily marked up vs the incremental component cost so buying the ram yourself is significantly cheaper.
2) the same ram is genuinely expensive, but much cheaper ram is available and still works without noticeable side effects

If it's all about markup then it's pure profiteering and screwing the users.

If the only way to undercut the official models sufficiently to make the whole operation worth doing is by using inferior components then there is *some* legitimacy to trying to stop this, but the approach is wrong.
If someone is going to the effort of replacing the ram chips with something inferior to resell the unit then they're not going to think twice about shipping with an old bootloader either, or modifying the bootloader to bypass the check, or working out how to get the bootloader from the genuine larger ram models to work on the lower ram models etc.
Sure the hacked/old bootloader might get noticed later if someone tries to update it and bricks the device, but low quality ram or a poor soldering job could just as easily brick the device too. By the time this happens the seller will be long gone anyway.

This DOES hinder repairs. For instance you might have multiple faulty units with different faults so you take the working RAM from unit A which has a faulty CPU, and switch it onto unit B which had bad ram.

First these ARE already running desktop Windows, I don't think any are sold with something else.

Second, here are in question all the low level bits and bobs specific to this platform, you can't meaningfully run the low level drivers, stuff related to sleep and wakeup and so on in emulation. Even if you could even more you're lacking the code to handle Qualcomm hardware on the x86 side so it wouldn't help at all.

The police aren't going to find your stolen car with or without flock. That's not what they do.

They also don't stop thieves who steal catalytic converters.

There is definitely room to ask, "What exactly are the police accomplishing?"

This is a thread about exactly that, dumbass.

Stories like that don't sell ads. And that is the business of the news, selling ads. They can't afford to care about anything else.

We've known all along we can't deliver on the pie in the sky promises we've made, and we've hit a wall on faking it, and people are starting to realize it was all a scam to begin with, and we don't want to end up in prison like Elizabeth Holmes because the investors we've ripped off are powerful people with powerful friends. So please make it impossible for any new startups to compete, and illegal for to demand we deliver what we've promised, because that's our only hope.

Yep, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.qualcomm.com%2Fdevel...

Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again...

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

Why does demand for bitcoin exist? No government can prevent payments in Bitcoin, that's why it was created. North Korea, Iran, hackers, Wikileaks, etc use Bitcoin. If you want to pay a toll to Iran to transit the strait of Hormuz, you can pay it in Bitcoin. I've heard you can use it to send money over the Russian border to avoid sanctions (I haven't tried).