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Comment by entropicdrifter | Hacker News Reader

Not the person you asked, but I have opinions:

It'd depend entirely on the level of support a competitor offers, right? I mean that's why RPi is still so popular despite there having been a number of ARM competitors offering more power per dollar for like a decade now. The strong software support led to a strong community/overall ecosystem, which has led to a strong install base, which further improved the community and ecosystem.

It's a combination of first mover advantage with continued strong software support that keeps them so prominent as-is. I don't see why a different ISA would fundamentally change that formula.

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This is exactly it, and I find it surprising no-one else seems to realise how much good software support makes an offering incredibly attractive compared to the alternatives.

Out of curiosity, who are the competitors who are competitive in power per dollar?

I don’t follow the space closely but the times I’ve checked out other offerings, they’re not competitive in price/$ or it won’t have wifi or other features to be comparable.

I actually started looking at older used desktops- which are fine for some uses and not so much for others.

Check out some of the RK3588-based SBCs. The Orange Pi 5 Plus is a fantastic alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 if you're okay with a bit of fiddling as mainline kernel support is still a work in progress.

I just got a Pi Zero 2 W and it seems like I won't be able to connect it to a WPA3 WiFi network (standard's only been out, oh, five years or so!) without recompiling the kernel, so YMMV over in Pi-land too.

Using a Pi as an access point with Hostapd has also been buggy and crashy for years now. There have been multiple driver updates that just seem to make it worse.

I’ve been doing development on a Rock 5B and it’s really powerful for a ~$200 SBC. I’ve been using as my aarch64 CI machine and test system as my company starts to add ARM support to our software stack.

Also, OBS runs great on it, although it’s not taking advantage of the on-board MPP media accelerator (H.264/265 and other codecs). Apparently GStreamer has support for it though and some folks have experimental FFMPEG forks adding support.

I am not usually a fan of recommending youtube videos for people seeking information, but the goto I use for keeping up with SBCs competitive to Pi is the 'explaining computers' channel. It is oriented towards the lower end of audience sophistication but gives a quick breakdown of the features along with practical uses and actual setup and configuration of boards instead of just a rundown of specs.

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