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Comment by Matsta | Hacker News Reader

By the time you get a Rpi 4, a decent power supply and an external SSD, it's usually around the same price as a mini PC which you can get with a 7th/8th/9th Gen i3 or even i5 with everything included.

I get that the Rpi will use less power, but I imagine many people will be like me and have it overclocked to 2.1ghz, and my heatsink was pretty warm all day long.

I've recently picked up a Optiplex 3070 with a i5 9500t for $120 and bought 32gb of ram off ebay for another $40. Considering a Rpi 4 is going for $100 on eBay, it's not a bad deal at all.

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RPis are used as embedded controllers and such instead of a custom solution, which is why they are so hard to get right now -- many companies based their products on them when they were plentiful and now get priority over end-users for distribution. It is (or was) kind of a scandal as RPi's self-mandate was to provide cheap computing devices for learning, not for businesses to make products.

I've heard a rumor too that the rpi foundation is having a legal spat about that part with Broadcom right now too. Broadcom is pissed that their chips they were using as a tax right off are being sold for profit. That's why you can get RP2040 boards like the Pico no problem; they don't contain Broadcom IP blocks.

Ahh, that's interesting. I have been wondering why their newest product and design was the most (and only) readily available one.

The difference in availability is certainly related to Brcm's involvement but that could just as easily be Brcm's capacity problem, rather than a spat for which there's no official word on (and it makes no difference to consumers anyway).

This is almost exactly where I'm at. Amazon has quite a few ridiculously cheap refurbished units of Dell OptiPlex Micro, Lenovo M series, and Intel Nuc products. The Raspberry Pis I have (3 and 4) are impossible to use as a desktop, and they are actually ill-suited for embedded cases due to their power draw.

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