I always think people like you only follow Tesla and think everyone is stupid.
Why do you ignore all the other companies capable of doing this?
Just because other manufacturere don't put hardware in every car and let pay people for tech they can't use for years, doesn't mean these companies don't have the tech.
Nvidia has the tech, BMW has the tech, Waymo has the tech.
And while a Cybertaxi is still not allowed on german streets, Waymo is coming to munich...
That's like commenting about needing a Chromebook on a post the newest Blackwell GPU that can serve inference workloads of thousands of people. Just irrelevant.
Tesla's efforts on the original Roadster made them be able to transform the whole EV industry to the point that EV's are nowadays actually affordable. Not everything is exactly about your specific needs, and you shouldn't shout people down when they're lifting the whole field.
Seriously. It’s pretty clear that the new Roadster is not intended to be a practical car for the masses. And that’s Ok. There’s room for a “halo” product in any lineup.
If there is limited supply of memory production, and an 16GB student laptop is $800 instead of $500, then I would say the poor folk are justified with naysaying the new 128GB top shelf exotics.
Back to the K shaped economy, it’s not just annoying that some people have more money than everyone else, but given the gap in economic power, the goods that are produced are made for the people with money. With limited resources to produce material, are you going to sell to the bottom or the top? So the people not buying flying cars are left behind in more ways than one.
Of course a roadster is not the car to "drop kids and get groceries". I think op was not trying to imply that. But Musk stated his big plan was to sell an expensive roadster in order to afford building an affordable car. That was 20 years ago. The closest it ever got was a promise of a 35K Model 3 which at launch cost 50K. So, yeah, from that perspective, op's comment is relevant.
It's a tech demo marketing presentation with a jumping car in it, not a flying one. It does look pretty cool though. Let's first wait and see if/when this will even be available and not just a marketing stunt.
I make flying stuff all the time. Not as heavy but I don't see a reason why I couldn't and I won't need a couple of billion to do so. This thing 'flies' for a very narrow definition of flying. Call me when it stays in the air for a couple of minutes. Prediction: that will never happen.
Your definition for "flying" is hard irrelevant. Any toy plane that we do call "flying" flies only for seconds, but has concepts like lift / and / or thrust and / or aerial control thru different ways like aerodynamic stability or in-air thrust. So did the first aeroplane too. Hell, even hyper-maneuvering multi-mach air-to-air missiles just "jump" with your worthless definition of "flight".
This is what the Roadster is. You will see Roadsters in random parking lots, not just specialized areas, like it would be with the flying pinto (which failed) or some newer options that compromise arguably way too much to have long-term flight WITH driveability.
I just wish someone released a clone. The "computer" is worth like 5$. I've enjoyed programming and porting my 3D game engine to 20$ ESP32 devkits among others, and am looking for more "crazy" platforms. But I don't even want to touch playdate due to its pricing stance, even though my office has an unused one in the store room.
Do you mean the SOC costs $5? The Playdate comes with a screen, buttons, battery, OS, and 24 (admittedly small-ish) pack-in games.
I haven't looked into how that all nets out, but when I think about how much a Raspberry Pi costs by itself vs the Pi + a case, screen, and peripherals... I don't know, I can see how you'd end up around $230.
Heck, even just a set of Switch 2 Joycons costs $100.
Your math is off ~10x. The devkits I've developed for are literally 20-30$, both in 3.5 inch screen format, or smartwatch format, with a case, touchscreen, buttons, battery, realtime OS, RTC, wifi, tons of GPIO's etc. Only hardware things playdate has on top is marginally higher build quality, the swivel (that most games don't use) 10-20MB more RAM. Their decision to have a greyscale screen also saves them money, instead of a common full color one like those 30$ devkits have.
So it is beyond obvious that Playdate's price does not even closely match their bill of materials.
Even if you went up in power to a full Linux machine with 1GB+ of ram, there are obvious examples of devices like that like the RG3588 class. I have one, and it works nicely as a linux box running any software one can get running on aarch64 linux. Mine is relatively fancy and with postage cost me ~100$, but you can get a more "basic" one that is still way beyond Playdate on a hardware level, for about 40$.
What playdate has is a walled garden. I don't like walled gardens. Especially this far from release.
You comparing to Nintendo's first-party joycon pricing, I'm not sure you understand how deep walled gardens can be.
Most games I've played do use it, actually, sometimes when I wish they hadn't. (I really like the crank in many games, but some games go out of their way to use it when they should have stuck to buttons.)
> Their decision to have a greyscale screen also saves them money, instead of a common full color one like those 30$ devkits have.
...but the PlayDate's screen doesn't look like a typical LCD. It looks much closer to e-ink. (E-ink is even better, but the Playdate is maybe ~60% of the way there.)
I did some very quick Googling and it looks like this type of screen, at the PlayDate's size and resolution, costs about $30[1]. If the SOC is indeed $5 we're now at $35 from just those two parts, before assembly or anything.
> You comparing to Nintendo's first-party joycon pricing, I'm not sure you understand how deep walled gardens can be.
But Nintendo also has economies of scale to work with that Panic does not. I've used third party Switch controllers, and they don't feel as nice—I'm paying for quality. (Admittedly I don't love how the PlayDate buttons feel either, they're fine, not Nintendo quality!)
I do agree that the Playdate is a game console, and when you buy a game console you're paying for the cohesive ecosystem. PC gaming is better in basically every way but requires more work. Not much work, to be clear, but some.
I'm not entirely satisfied with my Playdate btw, because I don't love the game library. But it's cute and I really like the software (not the games specifically), I'm a sucker for UIs that are polished to an extreme level.
Obviously you picked a part that is the most expensive part of it by far, and a clone could just have a little bit smaller screen, even with the same resolution, to case for that, and the efficient price would never go beyond 50$ in any case. What I said about the devkits I've developed for is 100% true. The price is ~30$ with the screen, SoC, microphones, etc etc ALL peripherals, packaging, actually good documentation including datasheets and multiple example projects for TWO whole different ecosystems.
Nintendo's economies of scale is irrelevant here as A. They obviously have enormous markup compared to hardware price, because they can, and B. Those waveshare devkits aren't built with insane numbers, but they manage to keep their prices down very well.
To put nails down the coffin of the argument about "economies of scale" here, just check how many alternative devkits they have. I'm sure that some of these have barely sold to triple digits. But the quality has been good for all I've seen from them https://www.waveshare.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=touch+esp3...
I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.
Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...
I played Orbiter near its release - this is quite far from my intention with its focus on spacecraft and generally a low detail level.
My intention would be a game simulating, at least on a surface level, life inside an O'Neill cylinder, you being an individual doing things there that requires you to move around from the edge of the "world" to another continously, like delivering packages and such.
oof. I can only hope that as many as possible git clients/wrappers that people actually use stick with SHA-1. Solving issues related to that not having happened sounds like the least meaningful work one could be doing...
FSD has no real competition in its capability and market fit.
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