Its true that sticker shock over the Pandora price is to be expected, but there is a lot of other value that most don't see, such as: 10+ hour battery life, the excellent community repo, access to the Pandora devs like no other, games and technologies on the Pandora that aren't yet anywhere else, and so on.

But this is the reality: you can't make a device like this, for such a low price, if you want to keep it open and available to your customers without having to make serious compromises. The Pandora has excellent hardware controls you won't find anywhere else - the nubs are superb - and is an entirely grass-roots effort: designed, manufactured and supported by a rag-tag team of hackers who are doing everything they can to build the ideal device that we all like. The price reflects the economic reality of the circumstances.

And, this is proven again with the Pyra, where the community is self-funding all of the development, manufacturing and support costs - a real true, well-managed startup. Perhaps things will get cheaper when the money is on their side to be able to afford massively larger scales of manufacturing - but remember, there are only going to be 500 Pyra at first. That price helps get the next 500+ Pyra made. This was true for the Pandora too - it wouldn't have been able to survive as long as it has, and evolve into such a cool product, without traditional consumer-level economics of scale being discarded by the community and early adopters. We're paying a fair price for an amazing machine, getting value you will find nowhere else, entirely because the economies of scale are so difficult. If Pyra goes well (When), then there will definitely be opportunities for the price to come way, way down. But for now, those of us who can invest in the product properly, are the ones pushing it forward.

Never forget: Pandora and Pyra have been a real hacker-oriented project, from the very beginning and probably still well into the future. Nobody but us (well, Evildragon&Co.) controls this, and its been kept on the rails as a project so far precisely because the costs have been managed at a scale that is acceptable to those of us who understand what is being built here: the ideal, pocketable, 100% OPEN, Linux workstation platform.