That’s nice. Let me know when they’re $30 again.

The cheapest rpi that isn’t a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.

The pi 5 won’t ever be $35 because that’s not the price point it was designed to hit. That’s why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.

Can’t do much with 1GB. And the Pi4 isn’t part of a “product range”, it’s the previous generation product.

Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold. Same for the pi3.

As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint. You want a $35 computer, that’s how much you get. The original pi was $35 and had 256mb of ram.

-edit also, $35 in 2012 is $47 today with inflation. The pi 4 is a crazy good deal and readily available. This complaint just has no merit.

Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold.

Its a 5-year old product. With 5 year old specs.

As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint.

Yes I also didn’t specify a clock speed, storage size, network speed, etc. What I meant was a modern version of an old product with similarly modern specs.

$35 in 2012 is $47 today

And yet the Pi5 starts at $60.

You’re also missing the other half of this conversation where other SBCs have come way down in price.

Le Potato, Orange Pi, Zima products, Rockchip, not to mention all the X86 mini PCs, old office PCs, etc.

This is just goal moving at this point. And stating just plain incorrect facts. I’m out.

I’m not moving the goal posts, you just ignored one of them.

Its a 5-year old product. With 5 year old specs.

It’s a Pi. Cutting edge (or even modern or high end) specs have never been it’s selling point or goal.

Yea. I miss those days.

I wouldn’t expect that kind of price anymore except for the Zero models.

The pi 4 is literally $35 right now. The original pi, adjusted for inflation, was $47.

I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.

Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.

At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.

I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.

You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?

And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?

Yeah, I have to use some weird adapter cable to get some cards to somehow maybe work a bit, but still probably need some external power supply, because there’s no way an RPi can deliver 75W.

Yes, it’s doable, but in the sense that I could build a house with just a saw and a forest.

PCIe is mainly for SSDs, you don’t need those things with that.

Enough for Storage usually

Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.

Look, I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi,.since it’s just one of many tools we have at our disposal to get stuff done the way we want it and I don’t get why there has to be an objective best all around solution. If the Pi is what you are looking for: buy that, it’s nice that it has the things it has, it’s relatively low power and it’s tiny. If you are looking for more, buy more.

Of course there is faster stuff that’s older. For my setup, I want tiny and I want fast enough to host low-performance stuff like Home assistant, Baby buddy, an art stack, you get the jist. For this purpose a Pi that.goes into a literal drawer was exactly the thing I was looking for. It’s basically used to replace the VPS I have for security sensitive stuff (Vaultwarden). So “marginally more power” is still wasted power for me. It sits in a tiny cabinet next to my router now, happily serving me the wheel of time audiobooks and telling me when my.kid has.last eaten.

The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break.

A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.

That’s about 4x the price for pihole. Pihole runsnon a zero 2w with headroom to spare. So it’s 16€+SD card+power supply you got lying around. What you described is a pretty convoluted setup for that. I had pihole+ Octoprint running on a 2W before. Worked flawlessly in my setup.

Damn. Looked decent until I got to $30 on shipping.

They’ll probably be available on Amazon eventually

If you click through to crowd supply it’s only $8, which is less ridiculous.

But you lose the ability to have them toss a cable or two into the box at no real extra shipping cost to them, and I highly doubt their costs aren’t lower through their website.

Wasn’t actually pulling the trigger today either way, but it’s an odd setup.

Oh cool! I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.

I’d rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.

I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip

Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.

That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.

There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.

You can get the zero 2 w for 15-20

Yes that does seem like a compelling proposition but also a very different product.

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February(www.tomshardware.com)

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