Honestly... when I was doing my research, for the power consumption and the flexibility of Raspberry Pi, nothing came close to it, at least not at the time (2016). Since then, I've never even bothered to look at it's competition.
The 3B was a far superior alternative to the NES Classic I couldn't get at the time (and taught me what little I know about Linux - I even got a lesson in sudo one time when a command wouldn't work). o7
The 5 is already somewhat enshittified. The Non Standard USB power that makes you buy a propietary PS is one example (which I found out after buying one for my son).
I agree. Pi5 apparently uses 5v@5A max, which is outside the usbc-pd specs. Not sure why they didnt go for usbc-9v in and use onboard components to convert the power to something lower for cpu ( which i assume it already does from 5v )
The new ones are power hungry expensive monsters anyway. There are cheaper clones out there and I had pretty much decided never to pay for the gucci brand anymore.
The last project I did with one was build a moon and tide clock - all written in python with a motor controller, external display and individually addressable led lighting.
They’re also great as diy audio streaming devices for whole home audio.
I thought they started from the idea of creating an affordable device mostly for people that need and can't afford a proper computer... I guess money gave them amnesia
They did, and they still have the rpi foundation with that goal, as well as the for-profit subsidiary.
It's a flaw with effective altriusm-- you have a goal of fixing some large scale problem and at some point you realize you need large amounts of capital to expand your impact. But the interim period you are just going to be amassing wealth with this idea of doing good. And even then, you may never reach a point where you feel like you earned enough to solve your problem. I.e sam bankman fried
Now I'm not saying that rpi foundation hasn't done good in the world. I'm just saying that they did start off with a lofty goal and it is clear that they are wanting to expand and make more money. Maybe this means someday they'll be able to do even greater things through the rpi foundation.... but I'm not optimistic
I have to say I haven't looked into RPI history, I only remember a video where they were marketing a device that is affordable and very much suitable for learning programming, mostly aimed at kids.
Remembering that and seeing them now on the exchange kinda leads to a contradiction in my mind. Especially since a year ago you couldn't even buy a device if you had the money, let alone if you couldb't afford one as they intended at the beginnings.
They released a device with the intent of being a tinker kit for programming and interacting with the physical world. The next technological jump for hobbyists from PIC to Arduino, became an ARM SBC.
Of course, they released a cheap ARM SBC, and industry quickly learned that these are great for rapid prototyping and any case that called for a small low-power Linux system.
I wouldn't say they lost their way. There's still a great hobbyists market around it, and tons of good competition. I'd say it's more like they are a victim of their own success.
Shit. I guess my or anyone else's loyalty hasn't mattered. I've bought two competing products during the drought and now we are going to have maximum suckage from them since the investors will be driving the bus now. How long before they intentionally hold back functionality and hide it behind some bullshit subscription?
Outside of a few small local businesses that actually care about doing right by people, loyalty hasn't mattered for decades dude. Companies don't give a shit about any of us. Why even bother thinking in terms of loyalty, it's completely misaligned with how they operate.
Loved the Pi for hosting small services around the house. I've just replaced my Pi4 with a N100, 16GB, 512GB SSD mini pc which is so much faster, not to mention cheaper than a Pi5.
I have a dell wyse 5070 with a j4105 cpu that runs home assistant with frigate and z2m around 3-5W with a bluetooth and zigbee stick attached. If more processing is needed it will boost to 15w for example during docker container updates, but it will also perform much better in these situations than the PI does.
It costed me ~85€ from a refurbish shop and even had 1 year warranty. It came with 4gb ram, 128gb ssd, power supply and case ofc. It was a no brainer at the time when just the PI4 alone was like 80€ for 4 gb ram version if you could find it in stock. And that didn't include case, power supply or sd card.
Indeed this. Plus my minipc has dual ethernet which is handy as I run Proxmox and use the second nic for migration traffic.
The mini pc is way better than the Pi for my usage.
Not sure what a pi4 uses, but my NUC (16gb ram, 1tb NVME, quad core i3 up to 2.4ghz) running my smart home (HA in a VM) and a few other small services in LXCs uses ~7W on average. Loads more compute power if I need it at half the price. Even if a pi4 draws half the power, that's only $8 saving per year.
For months it was impossible for me to get any Pis at MSRP and then my employer suddenly bought 30 of them to use for signage around the office. That's when I knew the non-profit hobbyist/enthusiast org was gone.
I'm not worried about it though. In the meantime a lot of other stellar SBCs have emerged on the market.
Honestly I still haven't had a chance to try them out myself so I can't make a specific recommendation but that market has been exploding recently. I have a sort of nice problem where people keep gifting me their Raspberry Pi's once they aren't sure what to do with them so I keep accumulating them without trying.
That being said, the big ones I've had my eye on lately are things like the Odroid N2+, the Jetson Nano, the Rock Pi or the Banana Pi. Some of these cater more towards being integrated into projects that need a lot of GPIO, others are focused on just being a low cost low power headless server or thin client.
The SBC market seems healthy enough that by the time I need another SBC I'll have a lot of options. Biggest loss is just that having one extremely popular hobbyist board made it really easy to find solutions to issues in the community and now there is just a lot more variety out there.
You couldn't buy anything in retail because of scalpers. British shops decided to stop scalpers, so would only sell to existing customers who bought Pis before shortages. So, for example, I had no issues getting 3 more Pis. But if you would make a brand new account you'd see them out of stock permanently. This system worked like a charm! But they should've done it earlier.
Raspberry Pi Holdings has always been a for-profit company. This isn't some sort of new news with them going public.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a separate organization that has not gone public and continues to operate as a nonprofit. In fact, the IPO was structured to raise some funds for the foundation's global impact fund.
I am not saying that the IPO is a good thing, in fact I'm pretty certain it isn't, but it's worth knowing that Raspberry Pi is two different organizations with two different missions.
