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Comment by treesknees | Hacker News Reader

I was worried early on about availability. They started with the goal of getting into classrooms, being cheap so kids or low-income schools can afford them, but then you also had for-profit businesses buying hundreds of these to power kiosks and digital signage. I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.

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> I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh.

It is, especially when you consider economies of scale with things like computer production.

Building 50 boards is expensive. Building 500 is cheaper. Building 5 million? That's now custom equipment dedicated to the project, and costs just plummet per unit.

I also like the Pi4 model in which the "higher end" versions seem to be more profitable, subsidizing the lower cost/RAM models.

The RPi would be viable in my work at any price lower than the cheapest Intel NUC. We’ve bought 800 since November. We’ve decimated our Windows licensing costs, power use, MTBI, and shrunk our attack surface considerably.

There is really no competitor that has even been a consideration for us. Software stack is the hardest to get right with them at scale for fleet management IMO.

Do you mean that your company has switched 800 employees from Windows machines to RPi? Are the 800 people non-engineering? Are the RPis thin clients? Everything running in the cloud?

I was thinking servers.

Yeah the fact is that the more demand there is for it the cheaper they can make it, so everybody wins in the end.

Well except the people living around the place where the raw materials are extracted, but that's another story.

> I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.

I think the RPi's attraction for commercial users is less the price point and more the size of the community around it. It's by far the most approachable system to work with when you need a small linux device with cameras and gpio.

I suspect that was an initial concern too, until they came to terms with the idea that e.g. Cisco's requirements in a Raspberry Pi were both achievable and also help underwrite production of more imaginative things.

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