- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Cool! More ewaste and destruction of the environment during a climate emergency!
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…
The price is more or less the same as it’s always been, where is this nonsense 300% coming from? Are you quoting scalper prices as retail?
I’ve bought, owned, and used, Pi’s since the original. The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first version that I will not purchase and deploy, so fuck off with your bullshit and go back to shilling for YouTube advertisers, or whatever other corporate interest tickles your fancy, just take it somewhere else.
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.
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
What shops sell these?
The power button and RTC are my two favorite additions lol
I thought I would love a power button but after installing my pi4 in a case with one, I found myself setting the jumper to “always on” after every small power outage took my server offline and I had to drag my lazy butt to my pi to turn it back on.
Yeah that’s valid for that use case. Good thing they still allow the jumper
If you’re thinking about buying, be aware they removed the audio jack.
And still using micro-HDMI for some godforsaken reason
What’s the problem with it?
They also removed hardware encoding. They’ve had the same shitty h264 1080p encoder forever, but it was better than nothing.
I need a lot of good CM4’s. I hope they’re still ramping those up 😞
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.
- They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
- It looks like they are abandoning their older products. vcgencmd for example is still broken on the 3B+. Since they “fixed” it for the 4B. See https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224
I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:
- The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
- Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
- 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.
- They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
- Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.
- 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.
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Yea. I miss those days.
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.
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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.
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This is just goal moving at this point. And stating just plain incorrect facts. I’m out.
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I didn’t ignore anything. You edited your reply to make it look like I did.
I replied at 7:31GMT. You replied to that at 7:34GMT. You edited your original post at 7:44GMT for some reason.
This isn’t reddit where you can’t see when or if someone edited their comment.
You can get the zero 2 w for 15-20
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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.
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.
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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.
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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 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
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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?
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Enough for Storage usually
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.
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.
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I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi
It’s because they’ve become way too expensive for what they are. They made perfect sense and filled a gap when they were priced half of what they are now. They’ve completely lost the direction or purpose they once had, or intentionally changed it to be something else entirely. And it seems that just doesn’t align well with many people.
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.
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.
It comes with built in storage and a power supply, plus a passive cooling system, a case obviously, and removable RAM up to 16gb. It has dual display port, idk about resolution, I run it headless anyway. There is also a bigger version with a pice slot.
That’s a 2013 CPU. Pretty ancient, likely no modern codec hardware support. Also look like it hits a 208 on geekbench 5 single treaded, where a raspi 5 is getting 574. Multi treaded, you have the above at 708, versus the Raspi 5’s 1608.
So just off the cuff on the cpu, the +$30 raspi5 has 3x single thread speed, and 2x multithread speed. The PI does even better on newer tests. That doesnt take into account the large improvements to RAM either that you get going from decade old ddr3 to ddr4, or wifi 5, or being able to add an nvme, etc. Looks to me that youre getting a lot more computer in a $60 raspi5 than this $30 sff.
Im betting this $30 sff stacks up better against a $30 raspi 4, in which case, yeah, that tracks.
It’s pretty rare to have high performance requirements in an embedded application. Many people load one project onto their pi and for most cases it’s overkill. If you need modern codecs, then buy a streaming box. If you want a nas, then buy a nas. You also need to factor in the additional ~$20-$30 of stuff that you need just to boot up a pi.
So your argument is that a raspi 5 is too good of a machine for most use cases? That’s a wholley different argument than the “raspi 5 is too expensive for its specs.”
I would argue that you can’t really speak to people’s individual computing needs without knowing what they are.
Im personally using a 5 as a media box with libreelec, and after paying for everything, I’m out $90. That’s still $10 cheaper than a roku 4k ultra, and it does everything and much, much more without locking me into a ad-riddled ecosystem on static hardware. That’s a great value for money that the $30 SFF options can’t compete with.
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.
It’s pretty good ddr4, but okay. You can have 8Gb of ddr4 for another $20. Not exactly a bank burner for a server or client.
How about the other features? Does that 8GB ddr3 computer have dual band wifi? Dual monitor 4k support at 60hz? Native hardware hevc/vp9 decoding?
Id love to see a link to these $30 PC people are talking about. Even older SFF aren’t going for $30 generally, unless youre buying in lots.
Can you beat a raspi 5 with a recent-ish SFF going for $200? You bet, but that flips the “pi is bad value for the money” on its head.
I‘m not sure about the $30. but look at the Fujitsu Futro S740. They can be had for about $50 with 8gb of ram and an included ssd, have support for dual 4K monitors and so on. No WiFi out of the box, but they do have a second m.2 that can be used with a cheap WiFi card if that is what you need (or you could install a second ssd).
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 save from spending 150 bucks on one.
Yes, but it’s a hassle. I bought a 4gb from digikey a few weeks ago. They have a list of stock on their site, although it looks like they are currently out. They are a b2b seller, so you need to verify your identity to buy from them, but they will sell you 1 or 2 Raspi 5s directly.
All that said, the article is about Raspi ramping up production. It will get easier to buy them soon.
You can always check RPiLocator.com. Looks like there is a reasonable supply in Europe for the Pi 5, and some variant or other is available in many places worldwide.
I unloaded my pi 4 on eBay those past summer because the prices were so high and got the thin client for cheaper. No regrets.
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.
Oh shit thanks for the tip 🤔
Yeah np. They just came out with some new boards too. I’ve been trying to think of some projects I can use to justify buying one or two.
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
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’d recommend Orange Pi 5 plus. It’s much more expandable than OP 5.
Id recommend avoiding Orange anything until they can unfuck their flashing software.
Fucking windows-only chinese shitwear. Fuck Orange Pi. I’ll never buy another one.
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/
But you can get a used thinkcentre tiny mini micro on ebay for $80. Wtf would I spend 100+ on a pi?
Energy efficiency?
Most ppl do not bother to calculate that in(especially idle consumption) or living in an area where it basically does not matter.
But yes, no x86-64 device comes close.
$100 for no h265 hardware encoding.
Hard pass.
