"When looking for a device, we needed to look for what are termed ‘Industrial’ LCD displays. These tend to have better-quality metrics and guaranteed availability"
This explains the $60 price, which I personally find to be great value.
Look up the Innolux AT070TN90/92. It's been in production since 2009 and will be until at least 2023. There are people using it with the RPi, and no, it does not cost anywhere near $60.
Quite cheap but to compare, you also need to add the cost of the touchscreen and the board to drive all this, and your result would probably not pass EMC requirements (for a hobby project, you wouldn't care).
Still cheaper to source these parts yourself, you are right, but the official screen isn't meant to be the cheapest, it's meant to be cheap enough to be affordable, to workout-of-the-box, to be reliable, of good quality and have some guaranteed availability.
You can work with other screens and build and write your own interface if that's part of the pleasure you get from hacking on these devices, but for people who have other goals, being able to get an affordable screen that just works allows them to spend their time on other parts of their project.
They provide a model with a touchscreen for an extra $7. However, you can't work with other screens and build and write your own interface because on the Pi, all the display modesetting is handled by the closed-source binary blob running on the undocumented parts of the GPU, and the RPi Foundation won't enable DSI connector support in it for anything other than the official screen they sell. It's a fairly common hobbyist thing to do on more open boards, it's just not possible on the Pi.
A budget android tablet can cost slightly less than $60, and comes with the touch display, the processing power ( more than a raspberry's), the memory (more than a raspberry's), embedded wifi, bluetooth, sometimes GPS, two cameras.
Don't get me wrong, i love the pi, and the problem is not the price tag of the pi + accessories but the unsustainable pricetag of entry level android tablets.
Plus the pi comes with its GPIO, raspbian, and is more suited than an aout of the box android tablet for most projects.
Well for most of us €30 (the cheapest I found here in france) for a tablet makes it a disposable device (this is different in developping countries).
There is a recycling tax here that is as low as ~5 cts for a tablet or a comparable electronic device. The burden of recycling is on the developping countries we send our used gear to. Not to mention the use of raw materials.
Can't say that this does not apply to higher end device that tend to be unrepairable but their lifespan is longer.
A Retina iPad display is cheaper, takes DisplayPort in, and is significantly higher resolution. I don't think anybody has reverse engineered the digitizer but I doubt that matters for a lot of applications.
For a personal project, I would absolutely go your route. But as a business, the foundation has to hedge against non-availability of the panel, because switching to another panel would go along with additional development costs.
Sure, but this is surely pitched to people building things rather than companies. I don't think anybody in their right mind would integrate something so expensive into their product, and a Raspberry Pi while cute is really not useful inside something commercial.
I was thinking the exact same thing. In 2006, this company called BugLabs made this device called a Bugbox[1] which was a modular CPU that you could attach components to. It had GPS, basic touch screen, Wi-Fi and a few other features plus it was programable. I started to write an app for it and in Jan 2007, the iPhone was announced. It had more hardware sensor components at a similar price with significantly higher build quality. I loved the Bugbox concept, but it wasn't pragmatic and that's the sense I'm feeling from this.
