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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board

I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?

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There isn't one, that's what's so annoying. There are a lot of Pi-likes, but nothing with the same level of support and enthusiasm the Pi used to have. The community has just withered.

It's incredibly sad. I was in the hobbyist community as a younger teen since the beginning of pi till 2016-17. When I stopped at that time ESP8266 had just so much potential as the cheap microcontroller with wifi and RPi Zero W as the cheap microcontroller with wifi as well. The development environment had improved so much over the years and things seemed great. The alternative pi clones also were building their own identity and figuring out their software. Over the years I felt guilty for not experimenting given that Rpi4 had 8 gigs of ram! and surely the competition would be better. I bought a bunch of Zeros, ESPs and 4s when I couldn't find other alternatives much but surely that was because I was out of the community and didn't know what to buy. And surely there would have been ESP alternative in all these years with lower power alternatives now that IOT is going to be a bigger thing finally. Alas, last year I came back to the hobbyist scene finally! Excited! And it was all a major disappointment. All my favourite hobbyist stores in my country had shut down or increased prices for basically everything by a huge margin. It all seemed more polished but so much more void of the vibrancy of the earlier scene. All the experimental boards sort of failing. And I can't even buy the boards anymore. Thankfully I could retrieve all the boards I had bought in past so didn't have to chase boards in flash sales as everyone else I knew had to. But it's so sad.

There isn't a successor board, not really. But people have started to buy ultra small form factor (USFF) x86 computers and thin clients that got cycled out by corporations and leasing companies, with great success I might add.

The price/performance (+size) is about the same as for the Pi, the power draw is not as bad as with older Intel/AMD machines, and your I/O options and x86 software compatibility is vastly better.

The only drawback is that you're buying used instead of new, and that your starting price for a small home lab (albeit one that starts at 2-3x the power of a single Pi) is larger, which harms students and other makers on a shoestring budget.

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