[Arm-netbook] What I have done so far

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 3:09 PM, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:30:26 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>
>> But in the end, for the campaign to be successful, it also needs to
>> provide products that people want to pledge for (if nothing else, to
>> meet the minimum quantity to fabricate the chips that Luke keeps
>> mentioning), so everybody needs some kind of hook to engage with the
>> project.  It also serves to gauge interest in future products, once the
>> campaign ends.
>
> It's the way things work these days. Nobody will pledge money to support
> a standard on its own. As you say, you need a hook, and in this case it's
> a set of devices that aim to prove the concept.

 my partner marie has been looking up "sandwich" marketing strategies:
put the "new" thing *in between* two totally familiar "things", then
people grok the new one immediately...

 ... except there are *no* modular mass-volume computers around since
we as a world-wide community (i mean "every person who buys
computers") abdicated responsibility by buying cheaper and letting
manufacturers get away with hermetically-sealing our devices.

 most people have no clue what the difference is, they implicitly
trusted the manufacturers and have been betrayed by the manufacturer's
pathological profit-maximising behaviour.

 from the perspective that i view things from it's like the entire
frickin planet has turned into a bunch of sleep-walking zombies as far
as making decisions about the consequences of giving companies money -
and i *include myself* in that category of "sleep-walking zombie" only
up until a few years ago.



>> - Close family are still well served by the options already available
>>   around the home, e.g. Thinkpads a decade old (still from IBM).
>
> Thinking about this: I wonder if it would be possible to reuse existing
> laptop housings by somehow reusing their PCMCIA card slots to house EOMA68
> CPU cards. Maybe this has already been discussed somewhere.

 it was... waaay back around... mmmm.... 2010? 2011?  which is why i
feel sad for the vero apparatus arm64 open laptop team, because we did
such a thorough (and open) analysis here, all that time ago.

 bear in mind also that my sponsor was investigating selling thinkpad
X200's and stopped doing so (not just because francis began an
unethical business model around them, attacking chris on public forums
in order to make *himself* look like he was "better"... didn't work
because chris's reputation as an ethical supplier of libre hardware is
extremely well-known... but anyway...)

 so the problem of reusing existing laptop housings is that the moment
you pick one particular laptop housing you just automatically drove up
the price of that laptop housing by creating a supply problem, and
opened yourselves up to enterprising ebay hawkers hoarding them and
re-selling them at extortionate profit.

 ... bear in mind that it's *really hard* to do PCB designs so the
moment you succeed a lot of people will want one... thus the prices
*will* go up of 2nd-hand housings.

 secondly, as it's costly to do PCBs (cost is reduced for EOMA68
because you can do 2-layer PCBs...) you have quite large NREs, if you
want to recoup that and stay profitable you must sell the (rather
small) production runs at an extremely high mark-up...

 thirdly and most importantly: getting hold of the connectors that
will have been CUSTOM MADE to fit that ****EXACT***** laptop housing
are either laughably implausible (as in, the supplier will laugh at
you if you ask for 100 of something that was made 3-15 years ago,
given that they cost $0.10 each back when they were made in batches of
30,000 and above), or the tooling has long-since been melted down ....

 OR....

 the supplier *WILL NOT GIVE THEM TO YOU* because you, as a tiny
unknown supplier, asking for $20 worth of end-of-lifed parts, could
potentially jeapordise an extremely lucrative and long-term
relationship with a laptop manufacturer that has a TRADEMARKED BRAND
NAME.

 in short the vero apparatus team... well... we have to just let the
train-wreck happen, unfortunately.  they've cut themselves off from
external advice by running closed one-way online infrastructure (no
contact details on the wiki, no published IRC channel, no mailing
list, and a closed-membership for the wiki)...

 much as i am reluctant to publish such an analysis, you asked the
question david so i am summarising the key points of the various
discussions of the past few years: you can see clearly that the
analysis is not unreasonable.  if anybody does know how to contact
them, perhaps you might consider passing on the above analysis to them
for their consideration.

l.