A lot of the comments here seem to fall into the line of "Why would anyone use this Dropbox ? - you can just use rsync".
There's a huge gap between a Raspberry Pi which gathers dust in the corner and having a product that parents can buy their kids for xmas which they can use to teach themselves the basics of programming.
Yes, parents could source the components individually, install linux, setup up scratch, download some tutorials for their kids, etc. But realistically only very tech savy parents are going to be capable of doing that and even fewer of them actually will.
The comments are closer to "Installing dropbox is not the same as building a cloud based storage solution."
This is a nice raspberry pi starter kit. If it was marketed that way, it would be fine. But it's not. The marketing is simply wrong. This is as much a "build your own computer" setup as plugging a keyboard, mouse, and monitor into a Dell desktop is, and people are very rightly calling bullshit on that.
Most non-tech people I know consider "building your own computer" to mean being able to plug together your main board, hard drive, graphic card etc. This is what this kit do.
> This is a nice raspberry pi starter kit. If it was marketed that way, it would be fine.
This is why techies suck at marketing, no people would get what this is about. Are you aware that most people have no idea what raspberry pi is? To most people, a "raspberry pi starter kit" would sound like a kit containing a cookbook with a few tools to get you started and prepare a raspberry pie.
This marketing is for kids and their non-tech parents. Kids can't obviously compile their kernel from scratch and build their own computer. But it challenges their curiosity, show them how to assemble a computer in a basic way, it makes them want to build stuff and gives them a fun introduction to programming and the command line. Not that bad.
There's a huge gap between a Raspberry Pi which gathers dust in the corner and having a product that parents can buy their kids for xmas which they can use to teach themselves the basics of programming.
Yes, parents could source the components individually, install linux, setup up scratch, download some tutorials for their kids, etc. But realistically only very tech savy parents are going to be capable of doing that and even fewer of them actually will.