What would you consider surprisingly cheap?
Their last product announcement was the BUSY bar, a desktop timer with a display to show that you're busy. Pre-orders launched at $250 but they dropped the price to $219. Has not shipped yet: https://busy.app/
The Flipper One specs are significantly more expensive to manufacture than the Flipper Zero or Busy Bar. I don't think this will be a surprisingly cheap product.
I do think it's cool that they're building the product they want to build and letting cost be a secondary factor.
sewing and maintianing clothes was one of them, for example, so thats why it has a punch. They'd need to be able to open cans, as that was the most common long term ration, and they'd need to be able to maintain their rifles which had screws, thus screwdrivers.
a version with a wine bottle opener was made for officers and became common
Never realized opening a bottle of wine was so common to Swiss soldiers
To me it seems like the opposite, it has more connectivity and I/O than the Zero, but also scaled down, while using better materials, like they decided to outsource the project scope creep to the community, which makes sense to me.
Scope creep to hell and back. Could just let the device get turned off like literally any other device on earth, and not have to build a whole new fucking OS to get it running.
They even - for some reason - want to waste time "training their own AI model because general ones don't cut it" (which no one is likey to use). Could just build a normal RAG + context stuffing pipeline in an afternoon but nah, let's devote a few months to this completely unnecessary non-feature.
100 bucks say this doesn't see the light of day before 2030 (if it ever does!)
This is actually quite common in embedded devices and even elsewhere. Every Apple device does this, for example (the Secure Enclave is a completely separate OS running on a separate computer).
If you think about it, most laptops have been doing something like this for decades as well for things like brightness control etc., not with a different CPU but definitely an OS-like thing (i.e. the BIOS, using SMIs etc.)
The idea of the "single OS, single CPU computer" has been a myth for a while now.
God knows if they'll end up scaling back their goals, but the vision isn't "just" a few custom integrations.
At least since they started running Java on SIM cards.
I think we've developed software with "ROI" in mind for so long, that by now most people forgot how it was to use devices and interfaces that were made with passion and by taking your time, experimenting and finding the right way, rather than just rushing through stuff and optimizing everything for money.
I remember Flipper Zero had a ton of doubters early on too, myself included. I think I'm now willing to give them more slack to actually experiment and create something even more ambitious, as they successfully executed it the first time most doubted them.
It's not rare at all.
The reason you don't see those projects is because they don't make it very far. Big projects take a lot of effort and people and most people expect compensation for their effort. You can't compensate them without ROI.
As an open-source project they have some benefit of getting contributors to do some of the work. The hardware still needs ROI to exist. Making those custom parts requires up-front capital, which is going to need ROI to pay back.
Also why would you want/need someone else to purchase it for you? Because of your country's import laws, or reasons related to privacy/anonymity?