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Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they fe

Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.

azinman2 2y ago
What are the better alternatives? I don’t think any have anywhere near the level of software and community support nor stability.
- jsheard 2y ago
  The situation with ARM hasn't changed much unless your budget stretches to Amperes stuff, but the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap, and of course those Just Work with any Linux distro or even Windows. The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yeah, it's actually insane how much X86_64 stuff has dropped in price. Yesterday I received two Ryzen 9 mini gaming computers [1], one to replace my old rack mount server and one to be a home theater PC. Each cost about $400, and they are capable of emulating the PS3 and Xbox 360 smoothly (I don't really have any new games so I wasn't able to push the limit too much, but still emulating those consoles requires some horsepower!). Maybe I'm just out of the loop (very likely), but $400 for a super low-power gaming computer feels insanely cheap to me. The server one in particular will pay for itself in about a year due to power savings alone compared to my rack mount server. [1] Beelink SER6's for those interested.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    > The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price. Hard agree, I have one and I love it. Its currently doing the VM work of what a £10k server did in 2012. But if I want GPIO, and or battery powered things with linux, then the pi is the way forward still. Anything else, and a pico/esp32 will do well.
    - Marsymars 2y ago
      The top-end Alder-Lake-N N305 is good too! Double the threads, and probably a bit worse performance-per-dollar.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Any reason you can't do GPIO with the ESP32? I've had pretty good luck with GPIO in NodeMCU.
      - KaiserPro 2y ago
        I do! as I said the pico/esp32/rp2040 are useful tools to have lying around. I'm currently using one to be a stepper controller for a project I'm doing now. However the best thing about the Rpi GPIO stack is the support. If I google "how do I do x with y on pi" I will get lots of resources, along with the official docs (the rp2040 docs are great by the way) and a bunch of hardware that is mostly plug and play.
        tombert 2y ago
        Yeah, fair; there's something nice about the fact that the Raspberry Pi is "just Linux"; it's not some attempt at an embedded version of POSIX. You have the full Linux kernel and packages to play with, the GPIO stuff (if performance isn't a huge deal) can easily be controlled by simply writing to files, meaning that you can do quasi-embedded stuff in basically any language you want, or at least any language that has an ARM port to Linux, which is basically everything nowadays. Still, I'm quite partial to the ESP32 with NodeMCU just because the power consumption is so ridiculously low and NodeMCU + Lua is pretty easy since it has full GC and gives you a node.js-style callbacks that I think are generally easier to work with than doing it myself in C. Most of my embedded projects have moved to the ESP32 as a result.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      TBH for projects that need GPIO I would be inclined to use an RP2040 or similar hooked up to USB, then any machine can be used as the host. That's pretty much how the Pi5 works anyway, the GPIOs are driven by the RP1 southbridge which is more or less an overgrown RP2040.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    Especially if you're willing to go used. 5 year old lenovo, dell, and hp mini PCs are all over ebay as companies dump them due to simply being out of the typical 5 year enterprise warranty. They are otherwise still very potent and capable machines
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap Yes - and at the same time, the RPi has gotten more expensive, rising from ~$25 circa 2013 to $60-$80 for the latest RPi 5. Neither price including power supply and SD card. Of course the RPi 5 has more cores, a faster clock speed, more RAM, and built-in wifi so you do get more for your money. Once upon a time, you were looking at $25 for a Pi and $250 for intel. These days it's more like $80 vs $180.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Don't forget the 20-40% inflation over the last decade.
    - dvdbloc 2y ago
      Sure if you are trying to get a cheap desktop computer, the Pi always made a mediocre desktop experience. But if you need GPIO or very low power consumption or a SPI connection with a community that understands its quirks very well I doubt you are going to be happy with an old Intel desktop.
      - michaelt 2y ago
        The low power, GPIO and SPI on the Pi are all trash compared to microcontrollers, most of which are also cheaper and better documented. But if you specifically want to run Linux and have SPI and GPIO on the same chip then sure, the RPi will do that.
        chrisjj 2y ago
        OOI, why would any user care what's on the same chip?
        michaelt 2y ago
        Well, often they wouldn't. In some cases you want to avoid your programmers needing to know two designs, compiler toolchains etc - a microcontroller might push you towards using C, and perhaps all your other code is in Python and you'd prefer to keep everything in Python. If you're making something like a high precision time server synchronized to GPS, you might want your GPIOs to trigger direct interrupts on the device with the ethernet port. Of course, IIRC the RPi has USB ethernet so it's not a good choice for a truly high precision time server.
- eloisant 2y ago
  The Raspberry Pi is the best if you can find it at MSRP, but I haven't seen that for many years now. You can only find it for at least double and at that price it's not worth it. There are many alternatives that, granted, don't have a community as big as RPi, but are perfectly valid and can be found at a normal price.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    They are at msrp now for large parts of EMEA
  - wlll 2y ago
    I did a quick Google. The pi 5 4GB MSRP is $60 I think, there are some available on Amazon UK for £54.90 with delivery tomorrow. That's apparently $69.53, so above MSRP, but not terrible. There may be cheaper sources I've not googled hard.
  - radicality 2y ago
    rpi5 is at msrp of $80 for the 8gb version and widely available at that price in USA, just bought one few days ago.
- pokstad 2y ago
  Intel chips are becoming dirt cheap. Intel has a lot of cheap dev boards that are more robust than RPi. Maybe not the same level of community support. Recently I bought a refurbished Intel micro size desktop PC to replace my RPi home server.
- haunter 2y ago
  Depends what do you want to do but I'd say Dell & Lenovo micro PCs. x86, changeable and upgradable CPU, RAM, and storage. And they are stil very very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA I have severall Optiplex micros at home for selfhosting, playing around VMs etc and I love them. In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc. No GPIO pins though.
II2II 2y ago
It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product. From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past. I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.
Pxtl 2y ago
They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap. I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  I think the price has stealthily increased as the required dressings got more demanding. Like the initial pi could be powered by any random phone charger you had laying around. But the new ones are a lot more picky and demanding. The new one also really demands a cooling solution, which is yet another cost the old one didn't have without being an actual MSRP increase. By the time you fully dress a pi now it's like $100-130. The pi itself is only like half the cost if that.
  - Pxtl 2y ago
    My first Pi was a 3 and even that one was picky as hell about its power supply.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem Please do tell.
  - Pxtl 2y ago
    The Pi 5 has a power button finally, and a Normally Open jumper that you can wire into to implement a mechanical power-button off-board.
999900000999 2y ago
You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
- pquki4 2y ago
  I think they are referring to those mini PCs -- either new ones from Chinese brands with Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    I was thinking of competitors like the orange pi, which is basically a raspberry pi clone with worse support. It's still works but I sent mine back with an about 3 days since I couldn't do all the things I could do on a raspberry pi.
    - walteweiss 2y ago
      Do you mind going into details here? I have a RPi and a friend has Orange Pi. They’re the same, but his was cheaper and is more powerful.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability. Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges. I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job. You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features. If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.
    - ianburrell 2y ago
hilbert42 2y ago
I agree, and I would add that I think this IPO is the beginning of the end of what we were used to. The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.
klysm 2y ago
What are the much better alternatives? I’m not really aware of any
Narishma 2y ago
> Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.

azinman2 2y ago

What are the better alternatives? I don’t think any have anywhere near the level of software and community support nor stability.

jsheard 2y ago
The situation with ARM hasn't changed much unless your budget stretches to Amperes stuff, but the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap, and of course those Just Work with any Linux distro or even Windows. The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, it's actually insane how much X86_64 stuff has dropped in price. Yesterday I received two Ryzen 9 mini gaming computers [1], one to replace my old rack mount server and one to be a home theater PC. Each cost about $400, and they are capable of emulating the PS3 and Xbox 360 smoothly (I don't really have any new games so I wasn't able to push the limit too much, but still emulating those consoles requires some horsepower!). Maybe I'm just out of the loop (very likely), but $400 for a super low-power gaming computer feels insanely cheap to me. The server one in particular will pay for itself in about a year due to power savings alone compared to my rack mount server. [1] Beelink SER6's for those interested.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price. Hard agree, I have one and I love it. Its currently doing the VM work of what a £10k server did in 2012. But if I want GPIO, and or battery powered things with linux, then the pi is the way forward still. Anything else, and a pico/esp32 will do well.
  - Marsymars 2y ago
    The top-end Alder-Lake-N N305 is good too! Double the threads, and probably a bit worse performance-per-dollar.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Any reason you can't do GPIO with the ESP32? I've had pretty good luck with GPIO in NodeMCU.
    - KaiserPro 2y ago
      I do! as I said the pico/esp32/rp2040 are useful tools to have lying around. I'm currently using one to be a stepper controller for a project I'm doing now. However the best thing about the Rpi GPIO stack is the support. If I google "how do I do x with y on pi" I will get lots of resources, along with the official docs (the rp2040 docs are great by the way) and a bunch of hardware that is mostly plug and play.
      - tombert 2y ago
        Yeah, fair; there's something nice about the fact that the Raspberry Pi is "just Linux"; it's not some attempt at an embedded version of POSIX. You have the full Linux kernel and packages to play with, the GPIO stuff (if performance isn't a huge deal) can easily be controlled by simply writing to files, meaning that you can do quasi-embedded stuff in basically any language you want, or at least any language that has an ARM port to Linux, which is basically everything nowadays. Still, I'm quite partial to the ESP32 with NodeMCU just because the power consumption is so ridiculously low and NodeMCU + Lua is pretty easy since it has full GC and gives you a node.js-style callbacks that I think are generally easier to work with than doing it myself in C. Most of my embedded projects have moved to the ESP32 as a result.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    TBH for projects that need GPIO I would be inclined to use an RP2040 or similar hooked up to USB, then any machine can be used as the host. That's pretty much how the Pi5 works anyway, the GPIOs are driven by the RP1 southbridge which is more or less an overgrown RP2040.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  Especially if you're willing to go used. 5 year old lenovo, dell, and hp mini PCs are all over ebay as companies dump them due to simply being out of the typical 5 year enterprise warranty. They are otherwise still very potent and capable machines
- michaelt 2y ago
  > the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap Yes - and at the same time, the RPi has gotten more expensive, rising from ~$25 circa 2013 to $60-$80 for the latest RPi 5. Neither price including power supply and SD card. Of course the RPi 5 has more cores, a faster clock speed, more RAM, and built-in wifi so you do get more for your money. Once upon a time, you were looking at $25 for a Pi and $250 for intel. These days it's more like $80 vs $180.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Don't forget the 20-40% inflation over the last decade.
  - dvdbloc 2y ago
    Sure if you are trying to get a cheap desktop computer, the Pi always made a mediocre desktop experience. But if you need GPIO or very low power consumption or a SPI connection with a community that understands its quirks very well I doubt you are going to be happy with an old Intel desktop.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      The low power, GPIO and SPI on the Pi are all trash compared to microcontrollers, most of which are also cheaper and better documented. But if you specifically want to run Linux and have SPI and GPIO on the same chip then sure, the RPi will do that.
      - chrisjj 2y ago
        OOI, why would any user care what's on the same chip?
        michaelt 2y ago
        Well, often they wouldn't. In some cases you want to avoid your programmers needing to know two designs, compiler toolchains etc - a microcontroller might push you towards using C, and perhaps all your other code is in Python and you'd prefer to keep everything in Python. If you're making something like a high precision time server synchronized to GPS, you might want your GPIOs to trigger direct interrupts on the device with the ethernet port. Of course, IIRC the RPi has USB ethernet so it's not a good choice for a truly high precision time server.
eloisant 2y ago
The Raspberry Pi is the best if you can find it at MSRP, but I haven't seen that for many years now. You can only find it for at least double and at that price it's not worth it. There are many alternatives that, granted, don't have a community as big as RPi, but are perfectly valid and can be found at a normal price.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  They are at msrp now for large parts of EMEA
- wlll 2y ago
  I did a quick Google. The pi 5 4GB MSRP is $60 I think, there are some available on Amazon UK for £54.90 with delivery tomorrow. That's apparently $69.53, so above MSRP, but not terrible. There may be cheaper sources I've not googled hard.
- radicality 2y ago
  rpi5 is at msrp of $80 for the 8gb version and widely available at that price in USA, just bought one few days ago.
pokstad 2y ago
Intel chips are becoming dirt cheap. Intel has a lot of cheap dev boards that are more robust than RPi. Maybe not the same level of community support. Recently I bought a refurbished Intel micro size desktop PC to replace my RPi home server.
haunter 2y ago
Depends what do you want to do but I'd say Dell & Lenovo micro PCs. x86, changeable and upgradable CPU, RAM, and storage. And they are stil very very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA I have severall Optiplex micros at home for selfhosting, playing around VMs etc and I love them. In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc. No GPIO pins though.

II2II 2y ago

It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product. From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past. I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.

Pxtl 2y ago

They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap. I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.

kllrnohj 2y ago
I think the price has stealthily increased as the required dressings got more demanding. Like the initial pi could be powered by any random phone charger you had laying around. But the new ones are a lot more picky and demanding. The new one also really demands a cooling solution, which is yet another cost the old one didn't have without being an actual MSRP increase. By the time you fully dress a pi now it's like $100-130. The pi itself is only like half the cost if that.
- Pxtl 2y ago
  My first Pi was a 3 and even that one was picky as hell about its power supply.
chrisjj 2y ago
> the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem Please do tell.
- Pxtl 2y ago
  The Pi 5 has a power button finally, and a Normally Open jumper that you can wire into to implement a mechanical power-button off-board.

999900000999 2y ago

You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.

pquki4 2y ago
I think they are referring to those mini PCs -- either new ones from Chinese brands with Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  I was thinking of competitors like the orange pi, which is basically a raspberry pi clone with worse support. It's still works but I sent mine back with an about 3 days since I couldn't do all the things I could do on a raspberry pi.
  - walteweiss 2y ago
    Do you mind going into details here? I have a RPi and a friend has Orange Pi. They’re the same, but his was cheaper and is more powerful.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability. Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges. I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job. You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features. If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.
  - ianburrell 2y ago

hilbert42 2y ago

I agree, and I would add that I think this IPO is the beginning of the end of what we were used to. The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.

klysm 2y ago

What are the much better alternatives? I’m not really aware of any

Narishma 2y ago

> Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.