A point-of-sale computer is judged on a different scale from an office desktop. It runs one application for ten or twelve hours a day in a warm, dusty space behind a counter, and the cost of a fault is a queue of customers rather than a document delivered late.

That changes the order of the specification. Interfaces come first, because the scanner, receipt printer, cash drawer, customer display and scale all have to connect to something. Cooling and dust ingress come second, since the machine is usually boxed in. Raw processor speed comes a long way down the list, because most retail software waits on a database or a network round trip rather than on the CPU.

Evetech supplies these machines from its Centurion premises and delivers to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria in one to three business days, with regional addresses in three to five. Warranty is return to base, which for a till is an argument for keeping one spare unit configured and on the shelf rather than for relying on a repair turnaround.