Everyone uses general purpose computers differently. I feel your statement "they've forgotten what the RPi is all about" isn't just ignorant; its hurtful. Maybe their direction isn't parallel with what you want out of the products they make, but you should at least have the empathy to recognize that you aren't the main character in this play.
What exactly is the educational advantage (for the demographic that the raspberry pi is supposed to be educating) of the inclusion of 2x 4k ports and does that advantage override the opportunity cost of including the ports?
In other words '1080p ought to be enough for anybody learning how computers work from an SBC.
For hardware learning pis arent even that great, an stm32, Arduino , or esp32 is a fraction of the cost(so you don't have to worry about burning the io pins out as much) and the toolchain is basically the same(simpler I'd argue even)
But not sure I agree that arch is the best linux distro to start with for someone new to computers that grew up on an Ipad.
Their little 'breadbox' pi4* certainly points in that direction very heavily.
Their cheaper 'embedded' version (the zero series, and the pico) is doing what this guy wants.
* https://vilros.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-vilros?variant=...
Oddly, rpilocator doesn't seem to track them, so if that's your definition of "available"...surprise?
The RPi project is amazing and I'm glad it exists, but some decisions are just weird considering their goals. Though to be fair the RPi 4 & 5 improved the situation significantly.
If a full-sized HDMI port is somehow too big (which it isn't on the regular-sized Pi, and definitely not on the 400), they should just use USB-C ports with DisplayPort capability. I'd rather use a DP-to-HDMI adapter (which is cheap and effective) than a shitty micro-HDMI port.
Personally, I found the mini HDMI ports themselves a downgrade. One is forever looking for adapters. However, having two displays is nice!
It boils down to whether someone is using the device like a computer.
The Pi 400 is a nice, respectable computer and I use one for development. Two displays makes sense and is high value.
Now you can absolutely use the device.
I have an epaper project in development. I have the epaper setup and attached to a Pi 3. That makes sense and it works well. Code output goes there and I have it all in one place.
I use it in two basic ways:
One is headless, using VNC to access dev tools and code located right on the Pi. I keep various wi-fi setups handy and can copy a new one onto the SD card if needed. Usually, I am powering the Pi with my laptop in that scenario.
The other is via plugged in displays with keyboard and mouse.
I do both of those with Pi 3 and 4 devices.
The Pi-400 needs the display adapter and though I have not lost or broken one yet, it seems to me simply attaching an adapter permanently to the computer would make a lot of sense.
This thread makes me want to 3d print a different case so that I can incorporate the adapters properly and just expose HDMI slots like we see on the earlier devices.
Finally, just a tip:
I will often use my laptop as a display for the Pi with one of those HDMI capture devices. Power the Pi with the laptop and bring up a display to work with.
Then why don't you just...use the laptop? It's unlikely the Pi has better performance or compatibility.
For a lot of reasons, my primary laptop runs Windows 10. It has a lot going on. Sometimes a setup on the pi is easy. When that is true, I just leave things on the Pi.
It has two monitors, and an extra keyboard and mouse. The microHmdi->HDMI cables you can get for 2 dollars each.
It paid for itself in saved electricity bills in about a month (it replaced older computers and I set it up just when electricity went through the roof here in Europe).
On the other hand I did not need wifi or bluetooth. But wireless, and the extra HDMI probably does not add much to the price. I think Raspberry made reasonable choices regarding ports, etc.
Personally, I found the mini HDMI ports themselves a downgrade. One is forever looking for adapters. However, having two displays is nice!
It boils down to whether someone is using the device like a computer.
The Pi 400 is a nice, respectable computer and I use one for development. Two displays makes sense and is high value.
Now you can absolutely use the device.
I have an epaper project in development. I have the epaper setup and attached to a Pi 3. That makes sense and it works well. Code output goes there and I have it all in one place.
I use it in two basic ways:
One is headless, using VNC to access dev tools and code located right on the Pi. I keep various wi-fi setups handy and can copy a new one onto the SD card if needed. Usually, I am powering the Pi with my laptop in that scenario.
The other is via plugged in displays with keyboard and mouse.
I do both of those with Pi 3 and 4 devices.
The Pi-400 needs the display adapter and though I have not lost or broken one yet, it seems to me simply attaching an adapter permanently to the computer would make a lot of sense.
This thread makes me want to 3d print a different case so that I can incorporate the adapters properly and just expose HDMI slots like we see on the earlier devices.
Meanwhile, most of the competition focuses on beating the Pi on specs, availability, or price -- and none of them seem to have noticed that long support life as being the differentiator which leads to business adoption of the Pi hardware. So I suspect the status quo will persist for the foreseeable future.
1 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/you-cant-buy-raspberr... 2 - https://www.elecrow.com/blog/why-is-it-so-hard-to-buy-raspbe... 3 - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-ceo-eben-upto...
Fortunately we don't need belief, since the foundation has years of volume-based sales data on market segments, e.g. for the last two years they have prioritized industrial business users over education, during supply chain shortages.
Is there a published market segment breakdown for each generation of RPi?
The pi foundations focus(be it intentional or just out of a desire to stay open) has been to have prototypes created with raspberry pis that go into production without replacing the raspberry Pi so that device manufacturers are locked into large long-term contracts.
The inability for consumers to find devices available and the odd io choices(IoT video devices like kiosks would benefit from the double ports rather than a single full size HDMI) are IMO the intention of the pi foundation. Their focus is on generating contracts and fulfilling them, consumer devices are secondary.
That's to say they've "forgotten what the pi is about" insofar as they've made choices to grow the business/contract side of the pi foundation more than the education and consumer availability
The problem with the clones, and with clones in general, is that they're never quite 100% compatible. There's always some sharp edge there to cut yourself on. Fix that, and I'll definitely try a non-Raspberry Pi SoC.
Beaglebone Blacks have existed and been in stock through the entire RPi fiasco. They are almost completely documented unlike the RPis. The boards have full schematics unlike the RPis. You can buy the main SoC unlike the RPis. The boards have lots more IO and some really nice real-time units. You can get the documentation from TI without an NDA. And the BBB even has eMMC so that it isn't dependent upon horrifically crappy uSD cards. And it runs straight up Debian instead of some weird build. I can go on and on.
RPi has kicked the end users in the teeth over and over and over and people still won't change. People at my hackerspace are willing to spend a bunch of money on RPi to do Octoprint rather than buying a full blown x86 computer for half the total cost.
What the hell do the Beaglebone people have to do to get people to pay attention?
Beaglebone Black link: https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglebone-black
One engineering problem is that the power envelope is kind of tight. While the RPi simply will not work with 5V@500mA, the BBB does. If you bump the frequency, your power supply needs shoot up and you start needing heat sinks.
It really feels like the Beaglebone Black got the engineering aspects correct. Shame that even hackers are suceptible to marketing.
At this point, being able to use the Beaglbone Black is practically a superpower for me as an engineer. I can buy it. My end customers can buy it. It's real Linux so my end customer can bang on it as required. It's documented, so I can generate the embedded drivers I need and document them.
I suspect that with the industrial etherenet built in, the BeaglePlay is about to take on some of that character.
I’d the BBB cost me ~$50 AUD I’d be much more keen on them… for all the well outlined reasons. It it just seems to always cost more than I’m prepared to pay for that hardware.
The BBB Bill of Materials is public. What parts of that BOM should they throw out to get to you that $50 AUD target?
The AM3359 is $11 in 1K units by itself.
This is about what you can get for $50 US without subsidy: https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/verdin-arm-famil...
But this is not credible: "People at my hackerspace are willing to spend a bunch of money on RPi to do Octoprint rather than buying a full blown x86 computer for half the total cost."
I run Octoprint on a 4GB Pi 4. Total cost was probably $75. What kinds of setup are you talking about?
I can pick up a refurb x86 NUC with 8GB RAM and a 256GB M.2 SSD for right about $50 locally retail.
But for $50... hey.
I'm sure if you trawl Alibaba or any used computer dealer in your area you'll find something similar.
The prices are dirt-cheap though. How much stuff have you bought from them?
But, I mean, the computers are what they say they are. They don't lie as far as I can tell. So, if I go look up what I'm buying, I can see what kind of problems I'm in for.
It's a used computer store. WTF do people expect?
Otherwise at this point and prices if you're looking for a low power Linux computer I'd urge anyone over to the big three 1L families like the M7x Lenovo has or HP Elitedesk used machines since they are sub 60w and run circles around basically any single board pc
I have few complaints and fins the devices useful, affordable and fun.
If they want to increase access to computing hardware, their 'industrial customers first, everyone else can pick over whatever odds and end are left over' sales policy is a really strange way of showing it.
As for Zero W 2s: In stock right now: https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2
Edit: it's a bit premature. Only Chicago Distributors have them in stock at the moment and they are limiting the orders to 1, which is frustrating because I only need 2.
>an almost insane complaint
That's not the complaint. Not everything is a "I can make x money back" preposition. The complaint is "A $10 item is costing me $25." It's costing me 2.5x the price it should be. Maybe you should see it from that POV.
You can also keep going on about kids starving right this instant while I complain about 2.5x price difference, it doesn't change a thing. a $10 pi zero 2 w still costs $25, if not more given it's almost never in stock and runs out so quickly.
>Having grown up in a world where 8 bit computers with 4-16k ram (and no storage) cost the equivalent of $1000
That doesn't mean much though, does it? I'm not comparing today's costs to back when you grew up. Nor am I saying today's costs costs are worse than when you grew up. If I was, you'd be right. I am not. I am just complaining about the price I have to pay due to scalping/availability vs price something is advertised at usually.
----
That being said, I understand why shipping exists, but $5 overcharge for sake of it plus $7 to ship something this tiny is a bit iffy. They literally just pack it in a soft wrap and throw it in an envelope.
They are basically right, although I guess you should add "in much of the world".
I mean, for one or two devices, sure, whatever (as was my thought process when I bought them). But then I was like, "What if I add a pi zero to this, and this, and this!" and a $15 difference quickly becomes 'expensive.'
Genuinely curious.
Wow...
At least they're willing to take your money, a lot of shops had hard caps.
> Wow...
Prices should better be sub-additive, since otherwise market arbitrage opportunities appear (in this case: to get more than 10: buy 10, and find some friends who also buy 10).
If such an irrational pricing appears, it is a sign of market failure; in this case: if the demand is higher than the demand, prices have to increase until for the given pricing level supply=demand. This is how markets self-calibrate.
Point is, your use case doesn't match my use case. I hope they continue to make things more performant AND cost effective.
The pi was never meant to be a server.
It’s in a whole other category.
Later they find themselves saying hmm, it sure would be nice to have real SATA ports. Maybe a shared power supply for the drives and the CPU. It'd be nice to have enough IO and CPU to be able to saturate a gigabit link with encryption turned on. Oh, and a nice case with an active cooling solution built in.
Suddenly, a retired compact PC starts to look like strong competition.
If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD (USB or now finally PCIe with the 5), decent cooling and power and a case. You will be at that $150 easily and you won't even have 16GB RAM.
I used to mess with little pi servers all over the place too yes. But this was in the days that PCs were power hogs. There's better options now.
That's not true at all. Pick one rated for the workload, eg A2 ("application" rating, optimized for random io) which can be had for < 15usd and you're not gonna run into issues.
I use my $15 RPi Zero as a git server[1], and it is literally an order of a magnitude cheaper at current prices. I bought the one I have for $5 (it was a promo, but still. That's how cheap Raspberry Pi's can get).
> If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD
You'll need a good power supply if your Pi is destroying your SD cards. I lost a few before I wised up, and it's been years aince I replaced the SD card
1. Also hosts wireguard, has a bunch of webcrawlers and coordinates secondary backups between NAS and the cloud. It may not host docker containers, but the Pi is solidly in the "server" category for me, while consuming less than 1 Watt.
Regarding lack of GPIO - if you're going to use it for a server, then not sure why GPIO is even needed. But if you need GPIO for hardware interfacing, then plenty of much cheaper boards out there than the raspberry Pi. Such as the dozens of different types of ESP32 boards.
As for power draw - yes, a mini-pc will definitely draw more power. I guess it depends on electricity cost at your specific location. I'm currently running about 25 containers on a HP elitedesk G2 with a Intel i5. On average it draws about 15-20 watts. It can go high as 40 watts when I'm streaming something from Jellyfin that requires real-time transcoding.
Even if you don't want to buy on secondary market because concerns around ram, power supply or SSD. Then even a new mini-PC running something like a Intel N100 for $100-150 will vastly outperform a Raspberry Pi 5- yet still provide better I/O options + QuickSync.
One example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ZVYB2VmAM
I also ran a data center and an MSP where we always sourced used servers and never had issues with them running for longer than their intended 4 to 5 year lifespan.
I have pretty heavy workloads I run for side projects for friends and run everything on 3com gig switches I also got used. HP still warranties them and releases firmware.
Schools use off lease hardware other than chrome books that get beaten to death by kids without problems for years.
I really fail to see your argument against used hardware.
The pi ecosystem has become a total accessory one where you need non standard power supplies and video adapters to connect them up where a single used desktop PC gives more value and less points of failure - and when things do fail you can find readily available off the shelf parts to fix them.
For some situations yes new and warrantied hardware is a non debatable topic but who is using a pi for mission critical stuff and expects it to be robust enough to not fail?
Hopefully we have gotten past the "RPi is for education, not makers!" thing, there is really zero traction on big computer labs full of raspberry pis. even insofar as it's used in education it's still used for maker tasks, people building robots with computer vision or whatever, and some of those use-cases need the encoder too.
RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories). If it doesn't have video encode, why would I want this for plex instead of a NUC clone? why would I buy this instead of a big AVR32/STM32 microcontroller for building a robot? Why would I want this instead of a Bus Pirate for GPIO? Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it? Etc etc. It's barely an adequate product even with all the legacy feature set there, if you start pulling pieces off then competing products become even more compelling for many use-cases.
Reality is they will probably be fine because of the name recognition and brand but it's not good management either.
I'd love to see real numbers but just like with the RX 6500XT I just can't imagine the encoder is that big. We are talking about pennies more per die, and likely this will cost them more in total sales than the pennies represent in the total product cost - you are saving 0.1% of the MSRP and losing 5-10% of potential addressable market. Literally would just be better for them to eat the cost, almost certainly.
And you are correct that while nobody uses all the features, everybody uses some of them.
I frankly do not understand the decision to depart from mainstream SOC configurations here - which obviously would have an encoder.
In addition to what you wrote: it also has a really good software story. Everybody's got a build for raspberry pi. Something like an odroid or banana pi or whatever has a much more "gotta handle all the builds yourself" path. The power of being the standard, I suppose.
You can do a Teams call on it (with prerelease software). See two Pis conferencing that way here (call was slightly glitchy until one guy on the call figured out he needed to switch from his crappy wifi to a wired connection):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35_5wRKi_TI&t=415s
I don't get why anyone who wants to use it as a mini-desktop views the encoder situation as a deal breaker (from the linked comments):
it only takes around 1 processor to encode 1080p60 with our default settings (which is still better quality than the PI 4 hardware encoder)
Also, it's 32 bit, and a lot of software is starting to depend on the massive address spaces offered by 64 bit.
And there is no high ram model. Some stuff just gobbles so much ram that 512M isn't practical.
I'm usually more impressed with RockChip stuff anyway, though, so if the Raspberry Pi folks wanted to focus their efforts on affordable dev boards, I think there'd still be plenty of options for those who do want to play back 4k video on a monitor. They've done an excellent job with the Pi Pico, keeping it in stock and dirt cheap. I've gotten a dozen or more of those at like $4 each. So they're still catering to the "maker" types with those.
I'm excited to get a better version of something like the Pinebook Pro someday, based on a newer SoC with more RAM and a bit more GPU power for video playback and some simpler games like Minetest and Xonotic.
So:
- Pi Server: without all the stuff that not belong in it -- for a cheap price like you said
- Pi Desktop: with all the stuff that belongs there -- for a premium price.
Of course this means double design, double production line, double testing,. support, etc. And will most likely reduce revenue. This is probably why they go with the all in one approach.
Everyone else is getting onboard battery management and AI coprocessors and stuff, the Pi is busy trying to run on expensive SSDs because for some reason they don't just fix their software to run better on SDs(And lots of apps seem uninterested in fixing SD write issues).
not $35, but not what seemed to be $185 either