PI Zero, 9$ C.H.I.P and other arm boards

So, the Raspberry guys stripped their old board, applied some software tweaks to run at 1GHz and put a 5$ price tag on their device. Meanwhile, the 9$ CHIP is on its way with a tablet CPU clocked at 1GHz with wifi and bluetooth on board, and (planned) mainline linux kernel and opensource everything. What are your opinions on these devices?

for $5 you can just buy one incase you think of something to do with it later

It's not a question of opinion: http://8ch.net/tech/res/451534.html >nonfree bootloader <=> into the trash http://makezine.com/2015/11/28/chip-vs-pi-zero/

>>14469 this. Also: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/

The RBPi is full of binary blobs and broadcom crap, go with the CHIP. That being said it's never a $5 or $9 computer, shipping tends to be expensive on these.

>>14469 >>14575 you guys are bitching about broadcom's proprietary bootloader and suggesting allwinner as an alternative? that's, like, I can't even find words for what that is

Which SOC would be best for running just a simple tor bridge?

>>14579 something MIPS probably

>>14575 Honestly, I'm less offended about the broadcom stuff, then the fact that you need to purchase licenses to get the SoC to do the hardware decoding that it was already designed to do. It's pure crippleware, and this soykaf needs to stop!

>>14586 Forgot to paste. http://www.howtogeek.com/137654/how-to-add-mpeg-2-and-vc-1-video-codec-support-to-your-raspberry-pi/

keep it off the internet like a smart person anyways and you'll be fine with the nonfree garbage on it. as an exceedingly portable and disposably cheap device for programming, I think it's exciting. they just need to make more