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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education. They get cheap boards into the hands of people everywhere and provide plenty of documentation to get them started.

Raspberry Pi has the biggest community, and therefore it’s the best choice for anyone looking to get started.

If you’re the type of person who needs very specific features like AES acceleration, then you don’t want to invest in a board aimed at education markets anyway.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is actually very performant due to the Cortex-A72 cores, which are not common on other SBCs at low price points. It’s actually an incredible performance value in the space, even if it doesn’t fit everyone’s exact situational requirements.

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> The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education.

I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies.

It's a weird setup. Have a look at this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/meet-the-team/

There are two groups of people:

* Raspberry Pi Foundation (100+)

* Raspberry Pi Trading (27)

My understanding: The people in "Raspberry Pi Trading" do the hardware/software/documentation/product management/sales work, plus publish the monthly MagPi magazine. That's remarkably few people for this, btw. The profit of this operation goes to support the foundation, per the wikipedia page. There sure seems to be a lot of fluff there.

I think it would be wise to change that balance (100+ vs 27 full times) a little bit more in advantage of Raspberry Pi Trading part.

> I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies.

Hobbyists are part of the educational target. Raspberry Pi has introduced more people to embedded Linux than any other project.

We didn’t always live in an era of cheap SBCs. Before Raspberry Pi, the barriers to entry were much higher and much more expensive.

As much as people like to criticize the Pi for not having every possible feature or not being completely open source at every level, it doesn’t actually matter for 99% of projects. It gets the job done cheaply, quickly, and with a huge support community behind it.

The Raspberry Pi CM4 is now available for anyone who needs more granular access to IO or extra features like eMMC.

It seems like you didn't reply to I wrote, but rather to what you imagined I could have written. Or you're just pontificating in general.

In my opinion, Raspberry Pi's main problem has to do with using SD cards, which are prone to errors and corruption. It's a kind of media storage that works best if it operates more statically--for instance, you read some photos on your camera, remove a few, take some new ones... and that's it for the day. They are not intended to undergo a large number of read/write cycles on a regular basis, and that's what the Raspberry Pi makes them do, using them to run its OS.

You can use log2ram [0] to reduce the number of writes to the SD card. That's what I'm doing at the moment and haven't had any problems with my SD card, though it has been in use for less than 6 months so far. I agree though that a SD card is not the best storage option for the OS and would like to move mine over to an nvme drive.

[0] https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

I read this same comment in every single HN post even tangentially related to the Pi. As others have pointed out, the Pi can run just fine off of USB and the newer ones support it out of the box. I ran my version 1 256MB Raspberry Pi for off an external USB drive. I only had to _boot_ from the SD card.

There have also been, for a long time now, SD cards with much better durability than the cheapest ones you can buy on Amazon. I personally look for ones labeled "high-endurance" or for use with dashcams because those are much closer to a proper SSD in terms of wear cycles.

I wish the RPi foundation would make it clearer in their documentation and blog posts you're going to have a bad time if you use a generic SD card as if it was a general-purpose hard drive.

>As others have pointed out, the Pi can run just fine off of USB and the newer ones support it out of the box.

I'm fully aware of that. In fact, and ironically enough, I'm one of those people you are referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26157437

>I wish the RPi foundation would make it clearer in their documentation and blog posts you're going to have a bad time if you use a generic SD card as if it was a general-purpose hard drive.

Conversely, I wish they would tell all their approved sellers not to include those "generic" SD cards (Raspbian/RPi OS preinstalled and all) with Pi's.

The problem is that getting a good sd card or flash drive is still a roll of the dice - you can't tell if a given device will suit by looking at its specs.

eMMCs are made pesirically for this purpose and its a shame there is bo pi model using them

Pi 4s can boot from USB now, as of the Sept 2020 bootloader update. No need for microSD.

No, not only Raspberry Pi 4's. I've had this on my bookmarks for a while, which explains how to boot any Pi (some models differ with regards to the procedure, or the need of an SD card, such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, which still needs one): https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

The problem of reliance on an SD card is somewhat less nowadays with the Raspberry Pi 4. Its faster USB3 support allows you to just use the SD card for the /boot partition to boot the system, while you can maintain everything else (root, userspace) on an attached USB drive that can handle heavy reading and writing.

You can boot entirely from USB on the Pi 4s now. Don’t even need the microSD for the boot partition.

Booting from USB was possible for the RPI3 as well.

Lost 2 SD cards that way. It's a relic that should be phased out in favor of NVME or SATA.

What SD cards did you use?

I have seen high endurance ones available.

These have never failed me:

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/advancedm...

I even set up a testing rig to do randomized power shut down thousands of times; they didn't fail:

https://forums.balena.io/t/raspberry-pi-atp-amlc-microsd-car...

Found these via this 2018 HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16777238

Cortex-M4s have an optional AES core and hardware RNG. Pretty sad for a higher grade chip to be missing that. It doesn't consume much die space.

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