That's nice. Let me know when they're $30 again.
Yea. I miss those days.
I wouldn't expect that kind of price anymore except for the Zero models.
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.
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.
I'd rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.
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 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.
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.
The Pi foundation showed their true colors. Don't continue to support them.
What did they do, I'm out of the loop?
Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.
And now that they're finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they've jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.
Don't forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they're the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.
That's just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi's for surveillance..
Also if you get a slightly bigger form factor, you can just buy a much better one.
Tbh I can understand why they dedicated all of their stock to industrial customers instead of individuals. If back then they'd put all of their stock on the open market, it would've been scalped instantly. But what's even more important is that there are businesses who's products rely on the Pi being available, and tbh I'd rather have businesses using a Pi for their products instead of having to switch to a proprietary solution that nobody can service in 5 years.
Also: if you ever really needed a pi, you could've asked them via e-mail and they'd hook you up with one or a couple
The issue was they didn't direct the stock to the industry. They directed the stock to large customers and the small companies had no inventory at all for years or were squeezed (by the market) to the limit with a Pi4 going for $200 and more instead of $50.
The Pi CEO already went out in an interview and was like we did the right thing and would do it again. As such it was pathetic (to me) when they launched the Pi5 and were like community first. To be honest, they probably know that they need initial community support/software packages to sell it to their primary customer: Big companies.
Are they still telling their users to suck it?
https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/
The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.
But i have trouble investing further into them.
I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:
- Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)
That is so dump.
Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.
Pi 5 sucks massive balls.
They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn't work with any normal USB C psu.
This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn't included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.
Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)
The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.
I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.
Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff
Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it's so sad what's become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.
The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.
If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.
Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don't understand why they haven't explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you're using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can't use any normal USB charger with it.
Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.
The integrated GPU is pretty good though.
Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.
There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.
I think pi is on the road to mainstream. Probably time to shift to an open source hardware competitor to boost it. Not saying pi is bad, I have one and its great. Those like me who love tinkering should consider going the extra mile and „radicalize“ themselves to open hardware. The project I hear the most of is Banana-PI. https://www.banana-pi.org
Most alternatives use Rockchips such as Rk3566 or 3588 which are better in every way to the Pi chips of their respective price points. As long as they don't use the Allwinner chips it's usually decent out of the box but still a bit lacking.
I like Orange Pi more. They have pretty good out of the box documentation and a good range of hardware.
Radxa is also an option but they seem to offer the same stuff as Orange Pi but more expensive.
If you're thinking about buying, be aware they removed the audio jack.
They also removed hardware encoding. They've had the same shitty h264 1080p encoder forever, but it was better than nothing.
Ok, I can buy a quad core thin client for $30. The prices for these are too high for what they are.
Does it have dual band wifi, wide software support, dual 4k output at 60hz, 4gb of ddr4, NVME support via addon?
Your cheap thin client likely isn't a modern computer. The PI 5 is, and costing another $30 isnt exactly a roaring failure.
4GB of DDR4 is a lot worse than 8GB of DDR3. Those (slightly) older business SFF computers are plenty capable compared to the pi and their software support is at least as strong.
You're also going to have to add several peripherals to the pi that aren't included in the price.
Is it possible to get these pi's for that price now though? Because I member 2 years ago looking at paying rediculous scalper pricing for a pi to run octoprint on, and by the grace of my brother having a spare one was able to avoid spending 150 bucks on scalper bullshit.
When I found myself in that same situation I ended up getting a board from libre.computer. I've been nothing but happy with it and they're only $35.
I'm just hoping rockchip gets better kernel support. They are way better positioned on the CxB scale.
$100 for no h265 hardware encoding.
Hard pass.
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