It’s a tough call, because while their decision to go IPO sucks, they’re one of the few SBCs with consistent kernel support.
I’ve heard about a lot of headaches people have with other SBCs due to lack of support.
As much as the Pi Foundation sucks noodles, the levels of software support for the Pi is currently unequaled.
Anyway, here’s hoping it gets equaled, and fast.
What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have “lost its way”.
I’d argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.
Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.
But nowadays pis are in the no man’s land between. They’re priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.
I’m not sure, how that’s supposed to be sustainable.
They are too slow and unreliable for the industrial market though. If you have money you can just buy X86.
The pi3B+ and pi4B are still $35 for the 1GB models and have the same performance today that they did when they came out (and way more compatible software).
If all you’re doing is setting up a tinkering lab at a school, which everyone and their mom seems to want to do judging by the comments, you can still do that. The only thing that has changed is the entry of the sbc choices. Raspberry pi hasn’t gotten worse, the market has just caught up with them to some degree and that’s fine.
Maybe it’s just them not being sold here officially, bit I have NOT seen those for $35. They’re all closer to $100.
That’s definitely true but pretty much you can buy some x64 mini PC for a very similar price, and also similar power consumption that is going to be more versatile and powerful. For example you can run some VMs etc. on top of it. The only benefit of the Rpi nowadags is only their form factor.
For 70€ you can buy an N4000 mini PC with 6Gb of RAM, and 128Gb eMMC. This is just an example from AliExpress. I am not going to post a link here, but I believe you can find even more offers. Additionally, you can buy some thin clients second hand for dirt cheap.
With the right power supply and BIOS optimisation you can bring their power consumption to be comparable to the power consumption of the Pi, and would be a lot more versatile and powerful as a home/media/automation setup.
Yeah the support is what pulls me to them but anymore unless I need the form factor of the pi it’s hard to justify them. Like the only place I see a hobbyist use for the Pi is 3d printers. Outside of that everything else seems like a small form factor desktop is better.
Support is what makes me worry about Milk-V and their flood of RISC-V products. You see videos where somebody is trying to get Ubuntu working on Mars while using some colorful language or how the same guy purchased two Meles which were DOA and it makes me wonder how thinly spread their support must be. Or perhaps how packed the Pi Foundation and community support must be.
