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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

It’s nice that the rpi project has been received warmly but I think it’s success has come at a price here.

If anyone remembers why the rpi started life: it was to get cheap affordable hackable “computers” in front of kids and hobbyists for programming purposes.

The affordability and ease of use has become a bar that everything else is measured by “that’s x times more expensive than a pi” is a common response when better solutions for your use-case exist.

The raspberry pi has made many compromises to be at the price it is. No dedicated Ethernet controller, no SATA bridge, no eMMC-

It’s literally the definition of suffering from success because now it seems people don’t judge it on what it was meant to do; just on what it’s possible to do with it.

It’s worth remembering that it is not meant as a one size fits all general purpose computer. It’s a hobbyist programming board.

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Yes. What I love about the Pi is its versatility at a "disposable" price point. I can repurpose it for any project that takes my fancy at that moment without worrying too much if things go wrong. It's great! It might not be particularly good at any one thing but it's great for experimenting.

However if I have a specific long term purpose in mind I will look elsewhere.

> However if I have a specific long term purpose in mind I will look elsewhere.

I still use my 512mb pi1 for Kodi. That is, mostly watching clips/photos from my camera or occasionally sending it a YouTube link from my android tablet. The ui is a bit sluggish today but if you browse your library via an external app it doesn't even matter. I'm really curious how long it will last for that purpose.

I put a bunch of Rpis in 6" airtight boxes with an lcd screen running continuously outdoors from glaring direct sunlight in 100 degree summers to below zero winter with ice and snow piling up on the boxes.

The only problems I ever had with the dozen or so units after 2 years was a few sd card failures. I believe these were all rpi 2.

Out of curiosity, what was the application?

They were data gathering devices for small, remote oil and gas wells.

"The affordability and ease of use has become a bar that everything else is measured by “that’s x times more expensive than a pi” is a common response when better solutions for your use-case exist"

Yes to a point, but then these conversations always end up recommending $100+ Nucs. If some one asks for a cheap run about, a Ferrari isn't the answer. Although I will admit people ask for cheap run abouts that do 200mph with v8 engines.

"people don’t judge it on what it was meant to do; just on what it’s possible to do with it"

Doesn't this go both ways? Its possible to use it as a desktop, which it may not be very good for. Its equally possible to use it for many 100s of things that weren't intended.

I suppose at minimum you expect it to do what it was designed to do. But it succeeds because of what its possible to do with it?

Well, people don't even really look around, if you're using a distro like raspbian then you have incredible support for many SoC boards.

For example, something like a kodi would run _great_ on an orangepi winplus, since that board has a dedicated gigabit ethernet controller (so the full CPU is left available for actual decoding) and hardware accelerators for x265[0] and it costs about $40 depending on where you buy it of course. That's not "ferrari prices"

For micro-NAS appliances there's things that have existed for _years_ like the cubietruck which has an open source design, gigabit ethernet (dedicated controller) and SATA headers. Even has on-board eMMC.[1] and can still be purchased for around $80

This is what I know of off the top of my head, I'm sure if you look around you can find a _lot_ of boards that have your own particular needs. Not every problem fits in raspberry shaped holes.

[0] http://www.orangepi.org/OrangePiWin_WinPlus/

[1] https://www.newit.co.uk/shop/Cubieboard_3

On the eMMC side the RPI compute models do support it.

Though they come with a different set of tradeoffs the devkit is reasonably priced.

Thank you for saying this. I've been pointing this out forever and it always results in a massive downvote. The educational angle of the Pi is long long gone.

And what really intrigues me is how much time people will spend trying to get this SBC to do something in a one-off project when an extra $75-$150 will get them a system that can do much much more out of the box.

Does that more powerful $100-150 system have an ecosystem comparble to Pi's? Programming tools, shields, etc?

I suppose that could be a significant factor for some (but not all).

I think fear of the unknown here is part of the problem.

The real answer is: "yes, but".

Yes, there's a strong ecosystem elsewhere, the raspbian project deserves _major_ kudos for supporting so many boards and so well, anything listed on their site is basically plug and play, sometimes linux has to be coaxed into doing SPI, but that's Linux itself.

"But" you should have learned how SBC's are working already. Pi's are not the first and last word in SBCs and it's wrong to hold them to that standard.

If you use RPI for it's intended purpose there's no reason you'd be in this position now; learning how GPIO pins work is one of the only things that will differ strongly on a PI vs something else.

Unless you're talking about third-party hardware being built for the platform?

The SoC differs significantly as well. Raspbian works so well on official boards that this isn’t an issue, but it certainly can be with less common boards. Other SBCs may require binary blobs for certain functionality, and if the manufacturer stops releasing updates then you’re stuck with the last one they made available.

In a lot of cases, and I'll be specific to my ecosystem of choice (NXP i.MX), yes. There are thousands of pages of documentation and TRMs, there's an active kernel tree, the bootloading process is open and documented, there are toolchains and Yocto recipes and etc. Is it perfect? Is the kernel mainline? No in both cases. But they exist.

And regarding shields, a lot of other SBCs have keyed into the Arduino and/or RPi shield setup. I'm working with a Broadcom EVK right now that's not meant for hobbyists, and even that board has an RPi shield header on it. Pick up any recent Kinetis-based board and it's got Arduino shields on it.

But let's think about the complaints the OP presented. He's bitching about the on-board ethernet PHY and whatnot. External add-ons aren't even the topic here.

Price point? It isnt cheap. Im in canada. Getting PI after tax/delivery is about 50$. Want a power supply, sd card and basic case? That will be closer to 100. My last netbook cost less than 200. My current phone 100. The PIs are not cheap. In canada, and i assume a great many other countries, they are very expensive toys.

I'm sorry your import fees are so high.

But those import fees are not going into the production of the board. It's a very cheap board to manufacture and the recommended retail price was (and continues to be) one of the core principles behind the products design.

Those arent import fees. It is local distributors taking a big cut. The PI should be sold openly, without local franchise deals. If i could order one from europe i would. The import fees would be minimal. I bring prototype electronics into canada all the time. Zero import fees for small orders.

Which is pretty disappointing considering the original plan of a $5 computer. I think they lost sight of their original goals pretty early on.

Their original goal of being a charity promoting education in computing? I think you got the goals mixed up there.

Yeah, except this was never their orginal plan.

There _is_ a $5 computer (i think the zero still costs that in microcenters). But that was never the original plan

Not all are compromise, some are strictly bad design. And, unless you get it from some discount offer, which to be fair does come frequently, it's just expensive relative to alternatives.

You should go back and read the blog posts from the project before it became a product you could buy. They talk in great detail about the cost of things and explain why the trade-offs made where the right ones for the original purpose.

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