You have 3 choices:
1. Raspberry Pi
2. X86 System
3. Barely functioning SOCs with no mainline support and major software issues until eternity.
1. Raspberry Pi
2. X86 System
3. Barely functioning SOCs with no mainline support and major software issues until eternity.
A lot of the small/mini/micro form-factor systems (even ~five year old used corporate machines) are almost always the (significantly) better option at the price point. I bought a used Dell SFF system a couple of weeks ago for $119 that runs circles around the Pi in every way (16GB RAM, NVMe, real I/O, real USB, PCIe, six core i5, etc) while idling at 9 watts, which makes little difference in operating cost even in locales with the most expensive electricity in the world - especially as the Pi continues to be more power hungry and often requires a fan. The SFF system is even upgradable to 64GB of DDR4 and has a full length x16 PCIe slot and an additional x4 slot.
This machine does everything in my house, even functioning as a 2.5gb router which is already something the Raspberry Pi could never do. Add on a dozen docker containers, a VM or two, and the gap only widens. I did upgrade the RAM for $40 but the systems it replaced more than make it come out ahead on power and cost. You can still resell a Pi 4 for ~$70.
Perhaps most important - availability. There is no shortage of these systems on eBay and elsewhere (or new), there never has been and there likely never will be.
For many years the Raspberry Pi was a good default "go-to" for many applications but x86_64 has come a long way and at this point I struggle to come up with all but a few bespoke use cases for the Raspberry Pi.
I wonder if that’s unique to Israel, or if the ease of getting reasonable 2nd hand hardware is unique to the US.
My guess is that most of used PCs come from the US. A lot of companies have refresh cycles where buy new hardware every five years or so. There are a lot of support employees that get cheap mini PCs.
- rpi has GPIO pins
- many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
- rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
- yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
I do my development works on my iPad connecting to a remote VPS. And I always has a rpi zero 2 as my backup when I have no internet connection. You just connect ipad to zero2 using a usb-c to usb-c cable with a usb-c to micro usb adapter, then you can mosh from ipad to zero2 and keep programming. How wonderful!
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This is certainly one of the "bespoke applications" I was referencing. That said, I tend to feel that USB GPIO boards[0] are more capable and flexible when/if you need GPIO. There's also the ESP32 series which almost always make more sense for me at least. You can add as many of these as you want to meet any GPIO need you will ever have. In almost every case I've needed GPIO having it available over wifi vs being limited to a few inches from a Raspberry Pi has been tremendously more useful.
> - many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
Fair enough, but how often does this really matter? I'm not advocating for unnecessary burning of the planet but as an example at $0.20 per kWh a seven watt delta comes down to $1/mo which (to me, at least) is nothing over the lifetime of the hardware when factoring in the dramatically improved capability.
> - rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
Another bespoke application that is perfectly fair. This can also be achieved with a tiny travel router (I LOVE mine) which will also run circles around gadget mode in terms of performance and functionality - significantly better Wifi, multiple real ethernet ports, it's own USB host for whatever. Running OpenWRT of course so it's still a Linux machine you can do whatever with - including connecting the USB GPIO boards I referenced above.
> - yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
MicroSD is EXTREMELY slow and unreliable when compared to NVMe, microsd is cheap but you "get what you pay for". You can also achieve similar cost, swap-ability, and ease of overall use with USB flash drives which are often higher performance and more reliable anyway. A full EFI BIOS, bootloader, etc comes in very handy.
These are generally excellent points but the vast majority of Raspberry Pi use cases seem to be people looking for a linux machine/home server/etc that doesn't touch any of this functionality.
But hey, in the end use what works for you!
I did reference the "mini/micro" variants which are significantly smaller - with the sacrifice being loss of PCIe which when it comes to x16 + x4 slots there really isn't any way to get around. Mine can also take two 2.5" SATA drives depending on how you feel about that.
They are about a litre in volume. However they give up the pcie slots for the size.