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Comment by theothermatt | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance but what are the use cases for a device such as this? Are there specific industries or organizations that this is aimed at? Is it something that would be used by consumers/hobbyists for particular projects? Any insight is appreciated!

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A usecase that comes to mind is the general secondary school exams here in Finland. The exam is digital and done in a purpose-made OS, booted from usb-sticks. So every time a new version comes out, every school has to update their hundreds of sticks. Something like this is already used, but seeing as the exam authority already recommends Etcher software I can see this having a market.

Any links to a technical breakdown of such an OS? I'm particularly interested in the boot process and whether it's designed to run on non-x86 devices.

Kind of old school, but if you were going to give out usb drives at a trade show with a demo/app/video of some sort on it. A lot of rural America doesn't have fast broadband, so this would make it easy to distribute something without worrying about the internet.

I've wanted the Etcher Pro to come out because I used to manage dozens of IoT devices, it took the better part of two days to flash operating systems onto them before I could deploy them into the field. The Pro would've made that process take minutes instead of days!

At the cost of almost $1k USD

$1k is basically nothing to a business compared to the cost of paying some muppet to write 50 SD cards at short notice. Especially as it’s a one-off cost.

At my previous job we’d have recouped the cost within a couple of months at the most, and the sanity of whichever person was assigned to do the cards.

On use case I'v seen is live concerts that record the show and sell the show you just saw to you on a USB stick at the merch table on your way out the door.

Handouts at conventions or other events; provisioning large deployments in a corporate environment; vendors shipping media to customers who need it in physical form (computers don't come with optical drives anymore, and sometimes you can't download); small/medium-scale manufacture of embedded/IoT devices.

Just envisioning some uses off the top of my head.

I own a company that makes specialized hardware using raspberry pis (https://icryptonode.com/). This is very helpful.

That makes sense and I should have thought of it with all of the packages I've ordered from Canakit

if you have any product shipping with storage you need a way of flashing it. There are different ways of going about it:

    manufacturers offer pre programming, its an added cost and might have MOQ requirements

    your factory offers to build an automated programming jig, again makes sense at a certain volume level

    you and a bunch of friends and family sit around and program the stuff manually for couple of days straight

This device will make third option a breeze.

I actually had a need for this at my last job - I first heard about this 2-3 years ago and we would have loved to have it. At the time I worked for a company building music studios, and we had at least one IOT device in every room. Commissioning a building meant writing somewhere around 20-50 micro SD cards, which was pretty boring and rather time-consuming.

It might useful for brands who want to distribute 'swag' with USB flash drives with their logo on it, and some software or media flashed to it, to promote their product.

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