Why is it "incredibly exciting"? Near as I can tell from the web site, it's a relatively very slow processor (~1GHz) with little memory (max 2Gb?). There are other "Open Platform" options with similar limitations (Longsoon).
It's exciting because having viable diversity in computer architectures is valuable.
Programming* for different architectures forces one to carefully consider their design choices, and provides an incredibly powerful incentive to write high quality portable code.
*This assumes that you can take the performance hit of not using platform-specific hardware / inline assembly.
As a related example, every few months I cycle between Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs for my personal computing needs. Doing so has forced me to consider carefully what software I use, how I have my systems / environments set up, and which libraries are a good idea to use in development and which are not. I am a better linux developer for having an appreciation of freebsd's jails and macos's attention to design, a better openbsd user for having dealt with securing linux and windows boxes, etc.
It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise.
You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs".
If you need to play with slower, poorer supported hardware architectures, there are vast numbers of options, many of which don't require placing speculative bets on marginally performing hardware.
I don't, per se, disagree with anything you said, but nothing you said needs a seriously sub-par laptop to achieve.
>It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise.
As it stands there are very few usable PPC laptops, just like there are relatively few usable ARM laptops (although that is improving quite rapidly). The development of a modern PPC laptop would go pretty far towards making PPC a viable general purpose computing architecture, albeit one likely always reserved for enthusiasts.
>You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs".
I'm not saying that I need a PPC box to switch OS's, I'm saying that doing things on a different architecture is a good exercise and helps you learn things that can be improved your current one / shows you things that it does well that you should appreciate. It is a good exercise if you want to have a greater understanding and perspective on things you might ordinarily ignore.
The specs of their proposed laptop are indeed fairly weak, and last I checked PPC support was not particularly great in linux. There's also the issue of hardware bugs on a complex new system.
I completely understand people not being excited by this device, and even wondering why anybody would care. I care because it's different, and because I've seen significant value for myself in sometimes doing ordinary things differently.
