>> It's a win, just not as big a win as it might be.

You might be right, but context matters.

Me pulling my "cranky old man" card-- As Louis CK says, "Everything's amazing, nobody's happy."

My first computer was a 4K Tandy Color Computer, which cost something like $400 in 1982 (a significant expense at the time for my parents), and I learned to program in MS Basic.

To me, the Raspberry Pi is a huge win. It can do a million more things than I could do as a kid, and it's not relegated to loading code via cassette tapes or typing (we had to copy code verbatim from magazines back then).

That the device is so inexpensive makes the barrier to get into programming lower than it has ever been... Amazing.

I'm not arguing with any of that. If I try to draw a comparison between what got me excited about 8-bits and what's available on the RPi, I still see a disconnect. There was a visceral connection between POKEing a memory location and a pixel going black on my Spectrum, and that's just not there with the RPi. There's a big black lump of Broadcom-stuff between me and the screen.