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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Does a computer you can’t buy even really exist?

We’re in the realm of philosophy here.

I have one Pi 2, two Pi 3 and one Pi 4 and I hold on to them for dear life. I bought them each when they were first available. Never could get my hands on a Zero though. And now it seems impossible to buy any Pi of any kind.

An Orange Pi Zero 2 is around €50 on Amazon, or €30 on Aliexpress, which seems expensive for what it does.

If a €10 Zero existed I think it would sell like hotcakes; I can think of so many use cases! But maybe it's impossible to do, IDK.

> And now it seems impossible to buy any Pi of any kind.

I almost got a Pi Zero 2 W for 15€ in January, they had 2500, one per customer limit, but the site was heavily overloaded. So I went to bed at around 20:00 with most still available (2100 or so). Woke up at 4 and they were sold out. That was so far the closest I came to one (obviously I’m not buying the available ones for 100€).

I don't see why people are so attached to the pi when much more capable computers - 2013/14 era used Intel NUCs or Mac Minis - are available for a hundred bucks on ebay. Maybe lots of people are using the pi for low-power-draw projects but if people are running a pihole and other services on them you might as well go for the other option.

There's also the QUARTZ64 boards from Pine64 which are definitely available and include fun things like a neural processor: https://pine64.com/product-category/quartz64/

Can confirm - I use a Mac Mini with a Core2Duo as my main server to run DNS blocking, motion cameras, home automation, etc. It's great - my idle load is using less than 20W and its cool and quiet. It no longer runs new versions of MacOS, but it's been running debian for years now with ZERO problems. My only cost of ownership was replacing the ancient 5400RPM spinning disk as a preventative measure.

That and electricity, yearly it's 175 kWh vs 20 kWh for a PI, so about 45 USD extra at least this year. May go down one order of a magnitude next year. (the prices are the absolute max I could find for electricity in my area in a year)

I have three Pi Zero's (1) and they are awesome at 0.7 W for any IOT stuff. One I use to collect data from my Electricity Meter (S2 Infrared), submitted to Influx DB; the other two run Snapcast Clients for my Multi-Room Audio System.

I was just thinking, the best Pi you can buy is the one you can get… This quote was stolen from another fruit computer company (Apple) sales manager who used it in the late 2000s, when Apple had its inventory issues.

Apple Australia director Tony King would say: “Sell what’s on the truck!“, to which he would reply: “Tony, we’ve sold the [bleeping] truck…”

Yeah, we should weight those results for availability of the hardware.

RPi 400 is available, you can also buy other RPis in bundles with other accessories, only bare bones are missing.

Examples: https://botland.store/raspberry-pi-400/17918-raspberry-pi-40...

https://botland.store/forbot-sets-and-courses/14856-forbot-k...

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