I was probably overestimating the cost. Of the low-cost/low-performance series of Intel cores from 2016, this is the fastest, but it's still a dog of a CPU from almost four years ago. It is basically this laptop, but with half the eMMC capacity, no keyboard, trackpad, battery, or Windows license, etc. and driving a larger LCD panel. Notice that the laptop with similar guts retails for about my estimate. I'm sure that MCU2 costs more because of low manufacturing volume, and I guess the larger panel probably balances out some of the other cost savings, but I'd be shocked if it exceeded $250 in manufacturing cost, even if you include the panel.
Also, that $2,500 is not the purchase price. That's the upgrade price. It's an extra $1,000 if you want to keep the old hardware. So they're effectively charging you $3,500 for a computer that almost certainly costs less than $250 to build.
Either it is necessary to get it working, in which case they'll eventually be forced to give us all free upgrades to meet their commitment, or it isn't, in which case we're paying $3,500 to get something whose per-core speed is identical to the retina iPad Mini from 2013 (which is so old that Apple doesn't even support it anymore), and just barely outperforms it overall, solely because it has twice as many cores as that iPad Mini.
If we were talking about replacing the CPU with something even remotely modern, like a Cortex-A77 or later, I might not be laughing at the notion of spending that much money to upgrade, but we're talking about replacing something that's ridiculously slow with something that is just "very slow", for more than the cost of a new MacBook Pro. AND you lose your radio.
This is a joke, right? No, seriously. This is a joke, right? Because I'm laughing pretty hard at Tesla for thinking that this makes any sense.
