Is the RasPi doomed? Probably. (It's already being eclipsed by the
cubieboard honestly.)
But such is the life of media devices, hot technology one minute, woefully inadequate the next. The chips these systems are made from are really intended for portables with an adequate lead time to market. They have really short expiration dates, so making what is essentially a cheap dev system out of them doesn't really make any sense. Unless of course the chips used are future generation devices. And making it as a "platform to teach children programming" doesn't really make much sense either, there are better ways to do that. Notepad++, a compiler/interpreter, and a decent internet tut can get most people off the ground with what they already own. Flash game tuts are better at capturing interest than a bare PCB also, which is arguably a much more important point.
My opinion, the RasPi was wish fulfillment for developers, the public raison d'etre came after as post justification for the project. I Could probably do something interesting with one, so wouldn't mind getting one for free, but I wouldn't go out and buy one. My PC works just fine.
*THESE* COMs (Computer On Module) are far more powerful, but need a digit or two dropped off the price tag before I would get one
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What I would REALLY like to see is an economy COM that uses modern commodity laptop parts. Such a board would have stack-able I/O boards for interfacing with EE projects and the like, just like the above COM's can be made to do. I say "commodity", because I can get a dual, and sometimes even quad core 1.5+Ghz socket S1 laptop CPU for 5-7$ on ebay easy. And 2+GB of RAM for about the same price. I already have a few of each actually. And as powerful as modern ARM CPUs are, a modern laptop CPU would still lap them in performance. That's because x86 is typically tuned for performance, where ARM is designed primarily for power efficiency. Best part about such a fantasy device is that there exists far more free and open x86 software floating around out there. More devs too.
I wonder if such hardware would be something the ETO gurus could come together and design...? I may have to make a thread and test the waters.
-()b