Crappy Chinese laptop or not, it's still a cost-viable option and most importantly, it's a NEW product and it's not just an emulated system on a klunky Raspi DOS box.
A raspberry Pi DOS box isn't going to burn your house down(*); let's get real, here, this thing is nowhere close to UL approved and who here hasn't had a less-than-positive experience with a knockoff laptop battery? I don't want to ***t to hard on whoever designed this, they may be a very talented engineer, but frankly until I see Big Clive tear one apart and give a thumbs up I would recommend not leaving this thing to charge when you're not home.
(* I mean, sure, to be fair maybe it will burn your house down if you tinker together your own battery charging circuit and use Aliexpress-sourced lithium cells of unknown quality, but then that would actually be *your* fault. If you're not qualified to build something like that maybe you should just root an old Chromebook and run your emulators on that, at least there's some assurance there that your crap $200 laptop underwent some actual QA by a team of more than one.)
And sure, you could say the same thing about any homebrew/hacker project, but on at least a philosophical level I kind of feel like there's a difference in the level of "assumed responsibility" between, say, someone who buys some PCBs (populated or not) to build their own RC2014 or whatever homebrew machine vs. buying a preassembled unit. In the former case there's a lot more plausible deniability for the seller to say "if using this somehow leads to the murder of everybody you love and care about it's your fault, you obviously did something wrong and should have known better".
Everyone has the right to decide how his/her work may be used. And everyone else has to respect that. Otherwise, open-source hard- and software will stop being made, as people lose motivation.
This. I get it, China ***ting on intellectual property rights has its good points for the consumer (in terms of getting the maximum amount of stuff for free, right now), but this attitude really is telling everyone who puts their blood, sweat, and tears into these projects that unless they're willing to do all that work for free (even if all they're asking for is credit) they should just f-off.
As I mentioned before, I'm *very* curious, assuming these actually show up in the wild, if the CF card they come with is going to be loaded up with all the software you see in that demo video (and in photos in the listing), including the not-open-source-at-all-and-still-being-sold-for-money Planet X3. I get it, there are conversations that probably need to be had about how copyright regimes in the west can be overly heavy-handed and expansive when it comes to arguably "ephemeral" works like software for extinct platforms or made by extinct companies, etc (maybe it should be more like trademark and expire if the work isn't actually being *used* by a legal successor to the original holder), but none of this applies, it's straight up piracy. Nobody has the "right" to run this stuff because some ***hole is mass copying it to CF cards in an unaccountable factory somewhere.
