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Comment by aleem | Hacker News Reader

Got me excited there for a minute until I checked the price. I can't help but think this is way over-priced. The 6" DIY kit from Visionect is ~$600.

The latest 6" Kindle with WiFi is ~$80 (on Prime Day it was going for ~$50). Given that it has WiFi and there are some Jailbreaks for Kindle you could get a Kindle to do this same thing. If you want better contrast you could upgrade to the Kindle Paperwhite for $120. That's anywhere from 8% to 20% of the cost of the Visionect system.

EDIT: Turns out the Kindle can do quite a bit including running a web server, web browser, SSH and much more so this should be easily doable.

[1]: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704

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I don't really see the equivalence. The dev kit may be overpriced, but the price of a kindle isn't really a good indicator, to me. They seem like very different products.

How long do you think a kindle would last out in the elements? What is the battery like? What is the I/O like? Security (physical and software)? Is the screen contrast similar? SDK support? Customizability? 60601 ? All of these things are potentially expensive to provide.

Anyway, it may not be the right dev kit for your applications, but the fact that they share a display technology is a tiny piece of the puzzle. As you note, for you, the kindle might do a lot more for less cost (in which case, why not just use one?)

In my experience, looking at mass produced consumer electronics is a pretty terrible way to spitball the cost of anything that isn't mass produced consumer electronics.

The DIY kit cost is sort of irrelevant if you're making a product. It's the large quantity cost that sits at the top of the BOM.

It's very common for these companies to sell dev kits at high cost because the volume is tiny and the overhead of filling the order for them is large. This is nothing new.

You do know that the Kindle is subsidized by book sales, right? That and the fact that Amazon has both economies of scale and a zero-profit/market-domination strategy.

The Visionect kit is cheaper, more capable and better supported than comparable dev kits.

The Kindle might be subsidized in a general sense, but Amazon does not sell the devices at a loss. The base hardware cost is roughly equal to the selling price.[0] I would expect something similar from a barebones developer kit.

[0] https://www.mainstreet.com/article/exclusive-amazon-s-79-kin...

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