The Future of Consumer SBCs: Has the Pi Bubble Burst? [video]

Ever since computers got cheaper and smaller, we’ve found different ways to employ them where it would not have made sense before.

I suppose there are two main areas where the RaspberryPi is used: Embedded device and computer replacement.

For the embedded device case, what may have been an Arduino project pre-RaspberryPI became a, say, Python project running on a full Linux system. For this use-case, microcontrollers have gotten much more approachable and many development-grade embedded Linux boards have come out built to the standard of the Raspberry Pi and it’s ease of use.

For the computer replacement, I’m talking about the random media center boxes, tv-as-monitor, network server, or just low power box to use as a desktop. We have the new nucs and knock off or similar boxes because all they did was take a netbook without a screen and keyboard, slice up the main board so it fits in a square, and break out all the I/O ports. These things that can be had for $100-$400 are respectable, low-workload computers.

Has the Pi bubble burst? As long as these ostensibly brain-dead industrial control systems companies keep gobbling up the supply of them, yes. Has the embedded and small-computer bubble burst? Absolutely not.

I don't think anybody's learned any lessons about rpi, and that as soon as they return their focus to the consumer the consumer will start snapping them up en masse like they were before. Everyone still thinks it's a chip shortage and not a conscious business decision to target b2b and bulk rather than independent consumers.

I would gladly purchase many smaller Pi boards if I could get them at anywhere near RRP. I'm not sure why they're so hard get - there seems to still be hobbyist demand, and there's strong industry demand as well. What's stopping the Pi foundation just upping production?

Yes and no. Back in the day having a tiny sbc for any type of small task at home made a ton of sense since they were so incredibly cheap. GPIO, while nice, remained a gimmick for the most part. Fast forward to the 2020's, yes SBC's have become pretty powerful. However their price has skyrocketed and availability is almost none. For the price of a raspberry pi(or less), I can get a second hand office mini atx with 16 gigs of ram, 500gb ssd, a 5-6-7-th gen quad core i5 and a good amount of USB's and video outputs. And although 4-5 years old, it is stupid fast in comparison to any pi. I still have a bunch of pi's. One is an ssh server from the outside world to my home network but that's all it does. For anything else, I have two similar mini pc's in the corner of my flat and they do a much better job than any pi. One is processing a ton of data from a subreddit I moderate, along with backups, a small ml model to quickly filter out crap and whatnot. The other hosts dozens of docker containers running self hosted stuff - time management, documents, backups and so on. And there is no denying that x86(with all it's horrors) will always offer a ton more than ARM. All of which is horrible news for the pi's.

There are some potential applications still for consumers. Namely something that recently came to my attention - the beepberry. They are currently out of stock but this is something I'd adore. Get Kali running on it, and I want two immediately: toss one in my car and one in my backpack. I cannot even begin to describe how useful this would be. Then again - kind of a niche problem which is a subset of a relatively small niche to begin with - consumer sbc.

I am not sure about SBCs, which are typically anemic hardware plus some GPIO pins, but I do have high hopes for NUCs with ~desktop class PCs. I look at my miniATX build which is probably idle 99% of its operational life and continually wonder why I am not using a book sized computer for my everyday life. A NUC with a <30 watt power draw + SSD + up to 32GB of RAM would be sufficient for so many use cases.

The lack of availability and the associated price hikes have been a big problem. We also now have plenty of devices with RK3588 CPUs which are quite a bit more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 4, its been "obsolete" for a good year at this point and while they have focussed on solving availability issues other SBC makers have moved on with lots of varied devices.

I don't see the Raspberry Pi going anywhere anytime soon. It has a massive community and excellent Linux support I'm sure it will popular for a while. The problem as I see it is, cost and availability. If I can get a x86 based mini PC for less than a Raspberry Pi, then I'm going to do that. I'm not going to buy other sbcs though because everyone I've seen using them has just had a headache getting the thing to work and keeping it up to date (not mainlined kernel)

As the Pi got more powerful it moved into more areas. Some unassociated commercially based solutions now have "..or run on a pi if you have one" where you're really paying for some service fee or s/w costs (plex for instance) -they target other devices too of course.

If the Pi CM4 came with more motherboards which did PCIx4 (Taco from RADXA, the rockpi people) then you'd see it being used as the foundation for NAS builds and the like. Right now, Aside from the taco, I don't know what I can buy which exposes the PCI bus in a way I can buy semi-random cards to do eg SATA and work them reliably. Or some PCIx4 function which might suit another role.

I've found myself looking at breakout daughtercards for the M.2 slots (or whatever it is, which maps PCI into that format) -most of them seem to come with consequences: its not as fast as the single bus speed suggests if you multiplex anything behind them.

And, booting off devices which live on the M.2 slot sometimes seems painful from the write-ups: you have to fenagle the <whatever pi-like clone it is>/Pi boot state to respect that device as a boot device. Same with the CM4, there's a lot of "be brave and know how to do things with uboot" about driving that in any way more than the simple.

Pi "Clones" now mean they do uBoot and they have the GPIO grid. pretty much everything else is not necessarily very much like a Pi. Really? I think it's become "ARM core as a service" combined with some industry standard/semi-standard IO choices.

I'm running one Pi4 as a NAS, one Pico as a JJY watch time setter, one pi3 as a GPS tracker for Bert, and just retired one pi3 as a plex server for a chromecast audio: it turns out it's simpler to use closed-box solutions for some things, which makes me sad because I liked the IQ DAC I had on that Pi but it was not very nice to work with, in s/w.

I'll always play with small devices I think, but its more and more simply playing with s/w running on a small device which could be a pi, or a disused Mac, or an old laptop. Same-same. Other people do a LOT of GPIO based stuff or use the pi to emulate something else which is a different ballgame entirely. If you e.g. want the pi to run a slot car timing rig using hall effect sensors, you REALLY want a pi. Or a GPIO equipped equivalent. Being behind some kind of USB attached serial emulator just feels even more "janky"

I know people using Pi to emulate being an older CPU or an old I/O or storage device for some other old machine.