Are you sure this isn’t just because it’s the “wrong” people who are building them? Instead of the typical (older) FOSS/geek/whatever crowd?

It feels overly negative to me. People, mostly younger people, are building them, tinkering with them and are excited to post about them. Is it any surprise they’re doing so on TikTok or wherever? Yes, it’s a little ironic considering the anti-big-tech vibes mentioned in the article, but is it any different from when our lot were posting to Google+ etc?

I don’t know, this feels like a good thing to me, and something we should encourage. The more people playing and experimenting with tech rather than passively consuming the better.

If I was a teenager again today I like to think I’d be hacking one of these together.

Nah, it's not "the wrong people" but "the wrong purpose" with the purpose being no purpose or rather just "looking good on social media".

Which, don't get me wrong, is generally fine, because not everything has to be functional, art is important, bla bla bla. Problem however is when the algorithm gets involved and "being not part of the mainstream" becomes a mainstream metric to optimize for.

This feels like that, and - as it often has happened - it weaponizes the usual stuff to defend itself. Which we do not want, because the stuff it weaponizes is actually important, so it should not be tainted by the big value extraction machine in the cloud.

Most of the cyberdecks you see, though, are just cosmetic variations on "raspi in a pelican case". Some of those cosmetic variations are definitely impressive, but the guts are mostly the same between builds. The guy who 3D-printed a bespoke case to make it look like it was off the set of The Martian did an amazing job, but it's still just a raspberry pi, a display, and a USB mechanical keyboard, less interesting from a technical perspective than the one that's more or less the same, but using a beer can speaker and an 18V drill battery as a power supply, but again still just a raspi.

While there are definitely a few notable builds that involved actually-interesting technical problem solving, I think most cyberdecks make more sense through the lens of physical concept art exploring what a rugged or perhaps ultra-personalized personal computer can be.

Hmm perhaps you are right.

I think I'd over indexed on the unfinished look of some of them, but relooking at them as prototypes instead of the level of the original set makes them seem more reasonable.