They don't because the parts wouldn't be cheaper, iPhones are engineered to a standard much better than the average hobbyist could ever hope to achieve, and iOS isn't horrendously buggy while a roll-your-own phone OS can be pretty intimidating. If it was possible to build something *as good as* an iPhone, for *cheaper* than an iPhone, and the only added cost was a maximum of a day's work, there would be a lot more people building their own phones. True enough, but the point is that if there's no added value in buying the 'consumer' unit compared with just throwing together some off the shelf parts and spending a few hours soldering, printing and flashing an SD card - and if the latter approach is *cheaper* - then the consumer unit is pretty pointless.

Re: but that's the same as everyone elses review! Still and all, the description is a nice fall-back for Levy and Martin to cite in future: 'if only we'd known what we were doing, we'd never have made so many honest mistakes at RCL. And in this instance, the pedigree is anything but that of the 'clueless' or the 'amateurish'. I suspect that not a single down-voter (other than someone with a vested interest in nay-saying your post) has expended even a minute's time on examining the background of Levy and Martin: who they are, where they've been, and what they've done. Truth is, the Vega+ story is - very obviously - not a chronicle of 'clueless amateur retro gaming enthusiasts' but of the activities of a pair of individuals with significant roles in the life and times of Retro Computers Limited: David Levy, and Suzanne Martin. Either it touched a corporate nerve somewhere or the El Reg readership has a greater percentage of the naive and the ignorant than I'd thought. Not sure why your comment has been down-voted. Re: The Gnome Underpants have arrived! Homer It's criminal fraud, and RCL's directors (assuming it even has any) should be prosecuted.

So now, with no money and still no product design, and the law breathing down their necks, RCL has slapped together something that could have been constructed by a 7 year old in the Raspberry Pi Club at school.

With all that money just sitting around for so long, it was inevitable that the cookie jar was going to end up being raided for 'business expenses', where the only 'business' being conducted was personal shopping sprees and piss-ups. To me it looks like a bunch of clueless amateur retro gaming enthusiasts secured capital without anything even remotely resembling any forward planning, then sat on it for ages whilst doing essentially nothing. They seem to have missed the part where you need an actual product design, or at least something more tangible than the vague notion of what it might be, before you seek funding and make promises to build it. Apparently RCL doesn't understand what a business plan is.

Sinclair zx spectrum retropie