I like Swiss things. They're high quality, very impressive, and not always expensive.
- Swiss chocolate (especially Toblerone, but not just Toblerone)
- Swiss yogurt
- Swiss cheese (not just Ementaler and Gruyère - much more)
- Swiss watches
- Swiss Army knives (both Wenger and Victorinox)
- Swiss airplanes (Pilatus)
- The Swiss postal service
- Swiss railroads and trains
- The Swiss armed forces and military infrastructure
- Swiss mountains, Swiss lakes, Swiss cities, Swiss people
- Swiss computers
WHAT?! SWISS COMPUTERS?!
Where I work, we were looking for a single-board computer for a new project. Single-board computers, or SBCs, have gained popularity, thanks to names like Arduino, BeagleBone, and of course the great Raspberry Pi. But those are all hobby computers. We needed something with real horsepower.
We evaluated about a dozen different SBCs. Most of them were from Hong Kong or Shenzhen, China. Even though they had impressive specifications, we had serious concerns about their quality, reliability, engineering design, and workmanship. In addition, our SBC may have ended up in some government or military projects, and we had serious national-security concerns about designing something made in China into U.S. military equipment.
One of the last SBCs we evaluated, technically a system-on-module (SOM) and not an SBC, was from Toradex. When you go to the Toradex website, you see that they're based in Seattle. But when you dig a little deeper, you find that although Toradex USA is based in Seattle, the parent company is based in Switzerland. And you discover that their computers are designed and built in Switzerland.
Yep. All of our worries about quality, reliability, engineering, workmanship, and sourcing, just evaporated. The End.
