I wish they’d sell a tabletop version for hobbyists, but realize this is probably a distraction. But… the problem with a lot of these systems (including the old Sun boxes and things like ibm mainframes and the AS/400) is that they sound cool but there’s no real way for the typical new developer to “get into them” for fun and, as a result, you lose the chance for some developer selling it to their company based on his experience with the things.
Apparently (I don't remember it, although I probably did read the Byte magazine at the time) there was a rumor in the early 1980s that IBM's PC was going to be a shrunken 370, called the 380. [1][2]
I wish IBM would shrink their LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 Rack Mount down to at least an "under the desktop" model. To my knowledge, IBM still makes quality products and has excellent customer service. They have fun names too (Rockhopper and Emperor are types of penguins!) and they even have 3D models of their rack mount cloud computers with shadows. [3] In fact, when I first read about Oxide a year or two ago, I searched for "IBM cloud server", and left it at that. So IBM, could you please send someone from the LinuxONE down to Boca Raton to create our new PC? :) Thanks!
I own a Turing Pi 2 but the hardware it is running on is proprietary. The switch isn't managed. The manament software is very archaic. Yes, it is modular and stackable and probably thousands of times more hobbyist friendly than Oxide but so is edge computing in general.
For example, this form factor looks really nice for a “hobbyist edition” or “evaluation edition”: https://zimacube.zimaboard.com/. I would probably buy an Oxide rack like this as soon as pre-orders were announced.
They won't even tell you how much a rack will cost. Infuriating typically B2B "talk to Sales so we can decide exactly how much we can get out of you and segment the market on the fly" approach persists even here, it seems.
I wouldn’t expect anything else for a full rack in this segment: it’s going to be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and big enough that there will be some inevitable negotiation about prices.
That doesn't mean you can't have a thin spec builder and a pricing page, even if what that mostly gets used for is devs putting together a comparison of that to a cloud deployment or similar and taking that to the procurement department to argue it's worth opening the conversation.
