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Comment by deckard1 | Hacker News Reader

You can't really compare the Pi 2 to a 4. That's like comparing a 486 or Pentium to a Ryzen.

The Pi 4 is a serious device. 1GbE, USB 3.0. It demolishes the previous Pi devices across the board in performance. I think this is where people get confused by others using the Pi4 as a NAS or server or whatever. There is this misunderstanding of just how equipped the Pi is today.

> Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM.

I wouldn't even do this on my Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Anything less than a workstation with gobs of RAM is just asking for a headache. Unless you're just chopping together the random video for the family once a year.

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Unfortunately, the $100 price tag puts the Pi 4 in an awkward place: Not cheap enough to be a hobbyist board, not powerful enough for "serious" things. To me, that's extremely unfortunate, because I think many, many more people need a cheap, underpowered board they can tinker with than need a PC with some exposed GPIOs.

It's $75 for an RPi 4b with 8GB of RAM! And from my experience it's quite powerful enough for a lot of "serious things", including most casual desktop computing needs. And it's only $35 with 2GB of RAM, which is all you need for all sorts of headless server tasks.

So I really don't get where you're coming from.

Maybe prices are cheaper in the US, on Amazon.de I could only find the 8 GB model for $100 and the 2 GB for $60.

Probably best to buy from official raspi reseller - form at bottom of <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/> with links given specs

Good call, thanks!

It's worth noting there's also some solid competition for Raspberry Pis by other companies making similar hobbyist boards. I'm pretty sure there's one out there that might fit your needs but I forget the name of it.

I heard that things like the Banana Pi (or similar) use horrid chipsets that have very limited support, so they might not actually be of similar utility. If you know of any good ones, though, I'd be grateful!

Nowadays I use an ESP8266 for most things, but it'd be nice to have a small, reliable Linux machine for things like file servers at my parents' house.

I got a RockPi4 instead of raspi4. Definitely not as powerful but I don't regret it.

What are you talking about? What $100? It costs the same as rpi3 rpi2 or rpi1.

They might be talking about the 8Gb version

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