Raspberry Pi Ltd is considering an IPO
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Is the cheapest Intel system as power sipping as the Pi's?
I can get a 1GB Pi3 model B shipped to my door for £27 which will run off of any mobile phone charger from the last five years (heck, I just plug mine directly into the USB socket built into the wall outlet) and connect it to any TV from the last ten years with a £2 HDMI cable.
Cut your cloth.
An $80 Pi 5 is 25W.
However, the N100s are very competitive. Maybe even faster and cheaper, and less power hungry.
No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.
Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.
If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
They lost their way trying to cater to businesses that wanted Pis to drive digital signage or be the basis of some IoT deployment.
"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity [...] We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110506002027/https://www.raspb...
That has definitely been lost; they are still excellent education devices, but at the pricepoint I would have a pit in my stomach buying a couple hundred for students… assuming I could even get them of course.
It's just so much fun.
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...
Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.
For what many people are doing with them, ESPHome has simplified the process to programming an ESP32 to do what they want down to nearly nothing.
"Running Linux and being able to direct-drive voltage pins" is certainly still an existing market, but it is rapidly being encroached upon in both directions.
Now, the tooling around ESP32s is so good that that's no longer a reason. I would never reach for a Pi over an ESP32 unless I need something an ESP cannot offer, like USB ports or compute or gigabytes of memory.
This describes my trajectory over the last 10 years with the Pi perfectly too. I think a lot of people have jammed a small SBC like the Pi into what should be a micro-controller shaped problem hole, because it's comfortable and familiar.
It's just like hacking software at a dev day job, and it runs a Linux distro everyone is super comfortable with. It has GPIO you can learn how to call from any language you like, I already know ssh/systemd/apt etc etc. It will get the job done, albeit often less efficiently and reliably than a microcontroller, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time learning things.
I also think the huge success of ESP32 in the last few years has meant you don't see SBCs being used for what should be micro-controller problems as much in general anymore. Ten years ago, you regularly saw Pi 1/2 etc in this role in a lot of projects online. Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
> Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
Personally the reason I've avoided Arduino is the absolute pain in the butt that it used to be to get it connected to a network. Almost everything I build benefits from some sort of connectivity, and the Arduino was only really good for things that were purely offline. Even before the Pis had wifi, they had ethernet and I could just plug them in.
And now that ESP32 exists there's no reason to buy the wifi-enabled arduinos they now make, at 8x the price.
Why deploy a $25 Pi for a custom weather controller that uses ~2.5w, when a $5 ESP can can do the same thing on 25mW, and run off a battery?
ESP32 is obviously not a desktop or server platform. Personally, I don’t think Pi’s are either: flaky and fussy power requirements, and packages aren’t always cross compiled to arm64. I’ve wasted enough time compiling my own packages, and encountered my share of random issues that I’ll never use it as a server platform again.
I found a bunch of libraries (e.g., https://github.com/espressif/esp-zigbee-sdk), but nothing that seems easily usable as a zigbee controller/hub to flip switches in the house, out of the box.
OTOH, running home assistant on a pi is monstrous: overly general and bloated for my use case, need a beefy Pi to get decent performance and not need >1 minute to reboot after a power outage.
No, generally not. Sure, there is overlap. The power requirements, processing elements, available peripherals, storage capacity, form factors, tool chains and cost are all in very different classes, however.
Yes, I was talking to someone who was using a Raspberry Pi as a hot tub controller. Something a $1 ESP8266 could easily do.
And let's be real, it doesn't have 25W power consumption. You can attach enough things to it to get to 25W if you try really hard but that's hardly the same thing. The latest cheapo Intel parts are contenders (at ~10W, where the pi 5 actually operates) and if you just want perf you're better off with that. But if you want a low-level connectivity, a rich community, docs, and tailor-made projects, you still want a pi.
But as for whether they're chasing performance, the RP2040 isn't their flagship product. The Pi 5 is.
And I've had a Pi 5, under heavy CPU (not peripheral) load, start throwing undervoltage warnings when using a 5V3A power supply from a Pi 4.
Power
Idle power draw (at wall): 1.8 W (See note)
Maximum simulated power draw (stress-ng --matrix 0): 9.7 W
During Geekbench multicore benchmark: 7.9 W
During top500 HPL benchmark: 11 W (2.75 Gflops/W)This is compellingly saying that I was too hasty in assuming the low voltage warnings were from the 18W supply topping out. Thank you for this.
Personally, I had tons of power issues due to underspec cables with a Pi4. Irritating.
The ESP32 supports all of those protocols and Wifi and Bluetooth, and it has low power sleep modes. And there are RISC-V versions which is quite nice from a a warm fuzzy point of view.
I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO. I don't think people are going to use it as a standard computer (desktop / media server / etc) though.
But any sane design would offload the IO to a more capable MCU that has more than a single SPI channel, among other weird limitations.. Sure, hobbyists often do weird things, but the niche for RPi is pretty much 'basically a computer, but you could theoretically blink an LED' - the actual experience of using those peripherals is much worse that what you'd have in Arduino or Platformio. Try attaching an interrupt handler to a GPIO pin on Linux, now you need to write a kernel module :)
ESP32/ESPHome may have taken over the lower end with its easy config but there's still no real Pi competitor. A decade after the first RPi release, I still dread using any other platform when I have to design a board that requires more compute than an ESP32.
The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.
Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.
Besides the price, anyway.
This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website
Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).
No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.
Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.
I disagree. The NXP (i.MX line) and the TI (am62x) and the STM32 MP1/2 all have good mainline support.
What you say is true of most of the Chineese chips and of mobile chips but if you go with mainstream suppliers targeting the industrial / automative markets these days mainline Linux support is good at the SoC level. At the SoM level some are better than others but it's not that hard to pull the approriate DTS into your mainline kernel build even if it isn't already upstream.
RPi is probably better for hobbyists but that's not due to the mainline status but a community more in tune with hobbyists than the more industrial products.
I've built professional embedded Linux systems based in i.MX5/6/8 and STM32MP1 with mainline based BSP rather than vendor stuff but have only ever used the RPi for one off tools.
I honestly think that's where most of the demand is. It's an aspirational product, like a jacket you could theoretically go up a mountain in or a watch that works underwater or whatever.
That said, if you’re rolling a DIY remotely manageable industrial automation project? It’s the obvious choice.
Hard to beat being able to apt-get openssh, python, etc. etc. and the ecosystem of pluggable hats for just this purpose.
https://roboticsbackend.com/raspberry-pi-gpio-interrupts-tut...
This is testament on how out of touch they are.
The entire ARM ecosystem is far more mature than RISC-V, plus the main RPis are ARM so they have experience with it and probably access to ARM people.
The main reasons to use RISC-V currently are cost and customisability. There are also some quite high quality open source RISC-V cores you can use off the shelf.
If you just want to buy a chip and put it on your own board you don't really care that much about the ISA as long as the toolchain, bootloader, kernel support is there and stable (which is pretty much the case with RISC-V now).
But if you're desiging your own silicon the ability to make or modify an existing open source RISC-V implementation can give you the flexibility that currenlty only the very largest players in the ARM ecosystem that have architecture licenses have (I think that's pretty much limited to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung).
I expect the smaller but important players like NXP, ST, TI will be bringing out RISC-V chips taking advantage of this.
ARM have also been talking about making their fees dependant on the price of the final product so that could also push people to RISC-V, not just to pay less but also to not have to jump through the hoops that would be required to provide all the information to do that.
They are good devices, but they are bigger than Pi and are whiny. Their fans never turns off and creates background noise. I have quite a few of them.
On the other hand, Pi’s 25W contains tons of overhead for other devices. A 5TB external hard drive still requires way more power than a 1 TB one or an SSD.
It’s easy to dissipate 9 watts with some clever design.
They greatly simplify the whole SBC and effectively bridging the gap between RPis and Arduino - in cost and easy of use
It's not a full desktop experience, but they're running full Ubuntu - so you code on your laptop and it'll run on the thing - run whatever language you want and blink lights, shoot out emails or do whatever other hobby projects you want using your desktop dev environment. No fiddling with icky micro Arduino/ESP32 libs.
RPi have shown themselves to be a Broadcom shop - so their product direction is dictated by Broadcom's chip offerings
Example: LicheeRV Nano
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...
Even on rpi4, it's near impossible for a normal person to use the gpu because videocore6 is so locked down that you get zero lib support or documentation. And I'm pretty sure the only assembler is still from reverse engineering instead of the manfr.
Raspberry Pis do lag too, but they have significantly newer kernels, and are supported directly by several mainline distros.
I've chased a number of alternatives to Raspberry Pi in the interval where Rockwell SBCs were beating the pants off Pi 4s, only to find that they were shipping 4.x Linux kernels. My particular application uses USB audio devices, which don't really work prior to extensive rewrites of the USB audio stack in the 5.15 kernel. Raspberry Pi OS kernels are 6.1 or better. And Ubuntu on raspberry PI has later kernels than that (not sure which currently). Versions of Linux prior to 5.15 supported very old USB Audio 1.0 devices, but not currently available USB Audio 1.1 devices.
I imagine you would run into significant problems with video drivers being out of date on non-Pi devices as well. Raspberry Pi had to do their own Vulkan port, which seemed to require significant development effort.
I don't think that's likely to change soon. Rockwell doesn't really have a strong incentive to improve their kernel ports beyond what's necessary to support Android. And smaller SBC manufacturers aren't likely to have the resources to do a kernel port themselves.
Furthermore if the platform is popular enough the community starts to step in. You can even see in the comments section of the previous link:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...
Some hobbyist went through the trouble to rebase their patches on top of a newer kernel version: https://github.com/sophgo/linux_5.10/pull/1
Furthermore, b/c unlike Broadcom/Rpi chips, these chips are widely available for commercial use - I'm gunna guess 3rd party companies are more likely to dedicate resources to maintain the software stack (even if the chip manufacturer is doing a crappy job of it)
Exactly. Then there is more powerful Lichee Pi 4A (https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a) which directly competes with RPi4 and more powerful chips are in the making like P550 (https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550).
I think it's the right time for IPO. RISC-V development is making huge progress fast. They are also upstreaming some changes. While SG200x is quite old and has unfinished Vector 0.7 extension, new chips claim to have vector 1.0. The documentation is still lacking but their progress is clearly visible.
My thought is that they cater to different uses, because RPi (and its ilk) support an operating system. So you can decide whether you need or want an OS or not. For instance my file server benefits from all of the networking, file system, and so forth, of Linux. It supports, at the very least, a workable UI for setup and diagnostics via SSH and a terminal program.
A microcontroller is preferable for applications where you don't need a full blown OS, and where the size, cost, or power consumption of something like an RPi are burdens.
In some cases, an RPi is overkill but provides the convenience of hosting things like onboard dev tools. And unit cost isn't as much of an issue if you're not planning on selling or duplicating something. And an additional option is a microcontroller running as a peripheral to a full blown PC, where you get the benefits of the GPIO, but the comfort of desktop software tools.
My general advice for those getting into hardware-related hacking is to give both a try and develop your own taste for which one is preferable for which use.
(1) esp-idf is not in the same league as linux.
Mouser has the Zero for 15$, 16$ if you want presoldered GPIO headers. 4$ for a Pico. RS Online has them for 4.25$. There are probably hundreds of vendors that offer them for the same price if you plop the term into your favorite search engine. Amazon is the last place I'd look, but then again I absolutely do not understand this mindset that online shopping == amazon that some people seem to have.
e: formatting
If amazon is overpriced, the item might not be available from other channels/requires lots of work to get.
Another (related) point is that amazon is less risky than other options. You can usually get something cheaper from ebay/alibaba/banggood/etc
Somebody always has some nitpicky example, but in my experience amazon has reliable shipping and a predictable low-friction way of getting a replacement or your money back if something goes wrong.
They are just like TCP/IP for a purchase from china, with buffering in the US, chunking, retransmit and guaranteed delivery.
You can probably be more efficient with UDP from china, but you could lose packets.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=grip+strengthener&rh=n%3A14333021...
I will no longer use Amazon for anything where I actually care about quality or getting a legitimate product.
A few weeks ago I ordered the same USB charger a second time and got a different (but similar) item altogether.
Never shopped there before but finally bit the bullet and made an account.
Deposited $300 gift card. Amazon blocked my account completely (can not even contact support) and not long after got an email telling me it's due to sanctions suspicion and they require full KYC (including proof of residency and employment!) before I can ever see my $300 back again. I really don't have the energy to fight them for it...
Still asked a friend with existing Amazon account to order it for me. The seller cancelled the order saying "out of stock".
Our thesis is that seller is a money laundering front without actual product. Somehow Amazon's not closing their accounts, though....
With $8 shipping that will take ??? days. Meanwhile they have one for $19 on Amazon with two day shipping and no need to register on some other site for a one-off purchase.
Now the point is about the coolness factor. Which is measured by the Euclidean distance from architecture X to x86.
This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.
I would like to know how much the Pi Foundation would still own—could be an interesting dynamic there. And good for them to be able to use some of that profit for good (they do a lot of neat things for education / STEM).
From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:
> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.
Note that the foundation has had a majority stake in RPi ltd (as a private company) for a long time this is not a new structure.
Ah yes, the OpenAI approach :)
I know this is kind of a standard in tech, but it still eludes me where the value of the stock is.
And no its not just tech
Dividends are just adding financial inefficiency and removing choice from the shareholder.
Regarding the share of the profits I already explained. You have your share of the profits in form of liquid stock that you can decide to sell. It's the same thing.
And the answer could then be that you’re investing in a company which allows them to grow, and your money with them. Or that you store your money in a medium that hopefully at least keeps up with inflation (especially if you’ve spread the risk). Or just that you’ve taken a gamble and hope that other people will think the stock is worth more at some later point than it was when you bought it.
You know other people can look at a balance sheet of a company and also judge it's value based on how much it produces and on the expectation of future buybacks that will increase your share's worth. I wouldn't call the absense of dividends the maker of a pyramid scheme.
Again, it's the lack of dividends and the lack of any other tangible benefits of owning the stock like voting rights. I feel like you're so far down the "line goes up" rabbit hole of stock trading, that you can't even think clearly about what you're actually buying, and why would anybody buy it from you in the future.
So as a warning to whoever reads this, do a search for "dual class stocks", and see how many companies sell stock without voting rights as % of any index. Then see how many don't issue dividends. You'll see it's a completely separate subject.
They’re simply listing the two things they think actually provide any real value when owning stock, as opposed to ”line goes up”.
In other words, they’re asking why owning stock has actual value. They dismiss ”line goes up”, which only leaves dividends and voting rights. By that logic, if you aren’t paid any dividends and you don’t have voting rights, what is the point of owning the stock, except to gamble? That is what they want to know.
And then I think that what you have been saying, correctly in my opinion, is that ”line goes up” actually does have real value. But no one is trying to claim that dividends and voting rights aren’t separate things.
But as hobby computer, they are still a good value. There are faster boards and cheaper boards, but which ones are good? More importantly, which ones will be supported in five years? How easy it to install software? I read about distro that promises support, but then have to check the list of hardware it supports.
I have six year old Pi 3. I can install latest 64-bit OS on it. For my plans, something small and low power is an advantage.
I assume things have gotten better since then but they don't have 10+ years of good support.
From my experience with PLCs, they are hardened and robust to the extreme degree required by the harsh environments in which they are used. Last time I looked, the R Pi was the complete opposite. It can be crashed by just a nearby camera flash, and then leave its SD card corrupt to boot. Fine for hobbyists (apparently). Not fine for industrial applications.
I built an RPi 4 based plasma cutter and I've never had a crash. You don't get more EM interference than that, short of putting it in a microwave.
Just for fun try to find a way to get a Pi mounted up to a DIN rail with an enclosure that can resist industrial vibration and has good particulate penetration/filtering and ruggedized connectors. Good luck finding accessories that aren't 3D printed with materials that will break down when coated in machine oil or in direct sunlight.
Now try to figure out how to get whatever monster you built installed in an ISO 9001 or AS 9100 shop.
"Here's our end of the production line fan that blows dust off of your product for $4k because we used a PLC." There is lots of stuff like that that just has no business using a PLC.
Trust me, I loathe PLCs, but Allen Bradley will still sell you a drop in replacement for something the now retired previous guy put in service 15 years ago.
If going public is what takes them to realize it, I'll cheer it on.
Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
In other words: gambling, erection medication, and gay hookups.
The cynic in me can't help but wonder if somebody is hoping to cash out via whatever investors haven't yet noticed the writing on the wall.
And what those few companies that were actually successful — the “gambling, erection medicine, gay hookups” of my previous post — have in common is that they operate businesses that might have some trouble raising money through the gatekeepers of a traditional IPO.
(Logical conclusion: if I ever invest in a SPAC, it’s got to be a drug-dealing furry porn site for crypto traders at minimum.)
This in contrast with their SPAC competitor AST SpaceMobile, who AT&T just announced their strategic partnership with for Commercial service up to 2030 yesterday and spiked their stock 40% in premarket... to still be about $6.50 off the NAV lol
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/att-ast-space...
So yeah, I think the analysts and Engineers are hedging their bets. Starlink has launch capacity but that's about their edge as the incumbent at the moment. The rest have LEO satellites up and are ramping up constellations as we speak.
True that the majority have been major disappointments but you can find some good ones.
OTOH, it's not like I'm investing in individual stocks anyway, I'm on team Boglehead, and everything is in index funds, other than equity based compensation which I don't have at the moment.
[1] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
Vacuuming retirement savings of tens of millions of workers and piping the funds directly to Wall Street? I think that captured investor-class who pony up billions but don't vote at AGMs has led to excesses that are negative to society as a whole.
Can you be specific? Do you mean people putting their money into pension funds?
No, it does not.
channel: direct toward a particular end or object[1]
What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?
I feel the theoretical possibility of wealth being extracted from you is somewhat insignificant compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK.
A monopolistic stock exchange could, off the top of my head: increase fees, engage in rentseeking behaviour, impose unfair rules, discriminate (against companies and traders) or reduce the quality of service.
Listing on different (or multiple) exchanges ensures that they engage in proper competition.
> compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK
An apt example of why it's healthy to have competition. A working professional or business could relocate to a country where less of their wealth is taken from them.
Whilst shares may be listed on the NYSE, they don't have to trade there - there's a number of alternative exchanges/ECNs/books/pools/brokers that will happily buy and sell NYSE listed shares cheaper/quicker than NYSE.
Or can someone provide a reason that's impossible?
Bearing in mind I've personally seen screwups with processing thousands of credit card transactions with a software update.
As far as I understand, we are so far away from that reality since Reg NMS that we are facing the opposite problems, if anything: A proliferation of markets that brokers are obliged to trade at in the interest of providing "the best price", the combination of which has created a giant industry of latency arbitrageurs.
Those might be factors but I'd wager the dominating factor to choosing to list in a US exchange is the monthly volume of ETF flow on the indexes you join. In the current world I think this factor dominates many others.
Any ETF that a company is a part of increases demand for the stock which will increase the share price.
I get that a startup wants a high stock price so they can raise as much money as possible while giving up as little control as possible. Of course there are other circumstances where corporations' best option for raising cash is to sell shares. So in those circumstances, this reasoning still holds.
But what about when I've gotten past funding shortages and I'm a successful company and I want to invest in myself and take back some ownership? Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?
Or what if I'm ok not taking back ownership. I'm content to just stay with 60% ownership or whatever? Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?
In short, high stock prices only benefit me when I'm selling. So this reasoning baffles me for anybody with an ownership mentality.
I admitted upfront that I was exposing my ignorance. I'm willing to learn from anybody who will show me a bigger picture. But I dread a bigger picture that assumes that future success at any level can only be obtained with leverage.
The value of your company is decided by the market participants with supply and demand. There's the academic idea that your company can be valued by your profits and losses, but the truth is, those more less to do with with the value of your company than the potentially demand for your shares. In other words being in an ETF may be more relevant to your stock price than the debt on your balance sheet.
>* Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?*
You might not care, but the other 40% might. It's tempting to think the other 40% is just amorphous group of shareholders, but it's likely it includes your business partners, or employees who will want to see the stock rise so they can eventually sell. And those partners and employees, upon learning that you aren't maximizing their shares may choose to leave, ultimately damaging your business.
In other words, once you have multiple owners, as long as the green line goes up, everyone is incentivized to continue doing well.
Isn't the amount of profit the company is making (and how that will change) what matters and not what its share price is?
Like it or not, your job as a manager in a company is to run that company for the people that own it, same as if you manage a local grocery store for your neighbour Jeff that owns it. Jeff will be happy if his store appreciates in value the same way the shareholders of the corporation (its owners) will be happy if it goes up in price.
So as an employee of the company (the CEO is one too), you care because your job is to care, and in the case of senior management you also have a legal duty to care and the company can be sued if you don't.
Theoretically, more capital means, higher demand for equities and hence better prices for the stock. Of course, this does not apply to all equities equally.
FWIW: ETFs also passively sell, too.
We may all ignore that bit when stock markets just seem to keep on rising, but if (when) they start falling the ETFs will be following the crowd too.
Agree that centralisation isn't ideal.
Perhaps I've just been reading too much on geopolitical power dynamics lately, but as a British person, I fear our economy is suffering from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts from seemingly "insignificant" decisions that pass on tiny parts of our sovereignty to other countries. In the case of companies trading on other exchanges, we're leaving ourselves more open to the whims of the investors on that exchange whose priorities and sentiments don't match the spirit of the country of origin.
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
There is no legal duty to maximize profit.
eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Newmark A Delaware Corporation has a duty to maximize shareholder value. That's the majority of all publicly held US corporations.
So I may generalize and state, _as a fact_, that the majority of public companies in the United States of America are driven primarily by insatiable avarice in a legal duty to their shareholders.
> ...
> Jim and Craig’s defense of the Rights Plan thus fails the first prong of Unocal both factually and legally. I find that defendants failed to prove, as a factual matter, the existence of a distinctly protectable craigslist culture and further failed to prove, both factually and legally, that they actually decided to deploy the Rights Plan because of a craigslist culture. *35 I find, instead, that Jim and Craig acted to punish eBay for competing with craigslist. Directors of a for-profit Delaware corporation cannot deploy a rights plan to defend a business strategy that openly eschews stockholder wealth maximization—at least not consistently with the directors’ fiduciary duties under Delaware law.
The finding was that craigslist was looking to penalize its parent company (eBay) and destroy its own value. The issue was not about making a profit but how shares are sold.
> Notwithstanding eBay’s express right to compete, Jim and Craig were not enthusiastic about eBay’s foray into online classifieds. Accordingly, they asked eBay to sell its stake in craigslist, indicating a preference that eBay either sell its craigslist shares back to the Company or to a third party who would be compatible with Jim, Craig, and craigslist’s unique corporate culture. When eBay refused to sell, Jim and Craig deliberated with outside counsel for six months about how to respond. Finally, on January 1, 2008, Jim and Craig, acting in their capacity as directors, responded by (1) adopting a rights plan that restricted eBay from purchasing additional craigslist shares and hampered eBay’s ability to freely sell the craigslist shares it owned to third parties, (2) implementing a staggered board that made it impossible for eBay to unilaterally elect a director to the craigslist board, and (3) seeking to obtain a right of first refusal in craigslist’s favor over the craigslist shares eBay owns by offering to issue one new share of craigslist stock in exchange for every five shares over which any craigslist stockholder granted a right of first refusal in craigslist’s favor.
And at the end...
> Assuming Jim and Craig sought to establish a corporate Academie Francaise to protect the cultural integrity of craigslist’s business model, the Rights Plan simply does not serve that goal. It therefore falls outside the range of reasonableness.
> ...
> Because defendants failed to prove that they acted to protect or defend a legitimate corporate interest and because they failed to prove that the rights plan was a reasonable response to a perceived threat to corporate policy or effectiveness, I rescind the Rights Plan in its entirety.
I would also point out that this was 2010 in a Delaware Chancery court where the Hobby Lobby case was 2017 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
In any event, any such duty would be likely to be meaningless. There are so many possible areas of confusion or inconsistency:
- Profit over what time period? - Profit vs shareholder return. - What level of risk is to be taken in generating this profit?
And so on.
[1] http://in-houseblog.practicallaw.com/fallacy-of-the-duty-to-...
> Responding to lower court judges' suggestion that the purpose of for-profit corporations "is simply to make money," the court said, "For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives.
The meme of "duty to maximize profit" has no grounding in fact beyond internet comments trying to excuse unscrupulous behavior of a company with the justification that it was maximizing profits.
There is a "maximize shareholder value" (which isn't profits) but this is also recognized to be fuzzy.
https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2023/03/...
> Corporate law has long required directors to act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders. In practice, this duty sometimes translated into a mandate to maximize shareholder value—at all costs. But while some businesspeople may follow that practice, most recognize that promoting shareholder interests invariably entails protecting the interests of others, such as employees and customers. Corporate law accommodates this reality by giving directors wide latitude in exercising their business judgment. Rather than such an impractical mandate that directors maximize shareholder value, courts say they must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.
> The flexibility in this framework entices advocates of non-shareholder interests to argue that directors owe a duty not only to the corporation and its shareholders but also to its employees, customers, and other constituents or “stakeholders.” Although this is certainly not the law, stakeholder advocates urge a norm in which directors no longer prioritize shareholder value but feel an obligation to such other constituents as well. Yet if it would be impracticable for judges to enforce a rule of shareholder value maximization, it would be more difficult to formulate a workable legal rule requiring directors to optimize across such contending interests.
The maximization of shareholder value was from Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> This case is frequently cited as support for the idea that corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth. However, one view is that this interpretation has not represented the law in most states for some time:
> Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting. -- M. Todd Henderson
> However, others, while agreeing that the case did not invent the idea of shareholder wealth maximization, found that it was an accurate statement of the law, in that "corporate officers and directors have a duty to manage the corporation for the purpose of maximizing profits for the benefit of shareholders" is a default legal rule, and that the reason that "Dodge v. Ford is a rule that is hardly ever enforced by courts" is not that it represents bad case law, but because the business judgement rule means:
> The rule of wealth maximization for shareholders is virtually impossible to enforce as a practical matter. The rule is aspirational, except in odd cases. As long as corporate directors and CEOs claim to be maximizing profits for shareholders, they will be taken at their word, because it is impossible to refute these corporate officials' self-serving assertions about their motives. -- Jonathan Macey
More fundamentally companies tend to be valued higher on the US exchanges, which gives companies a bit more freedom of action to raise capital from the market to fund their plans.
I don't think UK Gov will cry too much abount RPi. They certainly would be leaning hard on the board of, say, Shell, if that corporation decided to list abroad instead of London (as their former CEO has mooted).
US has very strong and deep capital markets. There's a reason New York has been the financial capital of the world for the last 100 years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
London has never attracted tech companies. Even when I was in the field over 20 years ago the combined market cap of tech was tiny. Only smallish British companies IPOed on London.
ARM was small when it originally listed. Now it is large and was not British owned - why would they list in London.
> It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US.
Financial markets centralise for liquidity. IIRC some dual listed European companies are moving to London.
Chinese companies are now considering LSE as an alternative to NYSE/NASDAQ for their dual-listing IPOs due to laxer oversight and auditing requirements, especially now that FCPA enforcement is in full swing and third party audits by Western organizations are required, which Chinese regulators are preventing.
That said, it's hard to beat the primacy of the American, Chinese, Singaporean, and increasingly Indian market (at least 2 late stage startups ik in the Bay Area are looking at listing on the NSE because they want to IPO but $100-200M in ARR and consistent growth is not enough to successfully list in the US anymore).
The mission was always to produce quality low cost computers for hobbyists and kids with open source software.
The moment you IPO you will have shareholders demanding you put profit before people and the users will always lose in that deal.
So, if they IPO, will they first be distributing equity to the community? Or are they just cash-grabbing a retirement play?
It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.
RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.
During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.
To avoid screwing /a selected subset/ of customers that had designed in RPi products.
> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.
Also I’m not in any of the jurisdictions mentioned, potentially there’s some kind of geoblocking on the document?
My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document, and thus use such disclaimer to attempt to push the responsibility to any party receiving the doc - "ah! see our disclaimer? you should not have read this doc, its on you now!"
But they do. Geoblocking.
Yesterday I received two Ryzen 9 mini gaming computers [1], one to replace my old rack mount server and one to be a home theater PC. Each cost about $400, and they are capable of emulating the PS3 and Xbox 360 smoothly (I don't really have any new games so I wasn't able to push the limit too much, but still emulating those consoles requires some horsepower!).
Maybe I'm just out of the loop (very likely), but $400 for a super low-power gaming computer feels insanely cheap to me. The server one in particular will pay for itself in about a year due to power savings alone compared to my rack mount server.
[1] Beelink SER6's for those interested.
Hard agree, I have one and I love it. Its currently doing the VM work of what a £10k server did in 2012.
But if I want GPIO, and or battery powered things with linux, then the pi is the way forward still.
Anything else, and a pico/esp32 will do well.
However the best thing about the Rpi GPIO stack is the support. If I google "how do I do x with y on pi" I will get lots of resources, along with the official docs (the rp2040 docs are great by the way) and a bunch of hardware that is mostly plug and play.
You have the full Linux kernel and packages to play with, the GPIO stuff (if performance isn't a huge deal) can easily be controlled by simply writing to files, meaning that you can do quasi-embedded stuff in basically any language you want, or at least any language that has an ARM port to Linux, which is basically everything nowadays.
Still, I'm quite partial to the ESP32 with NodeMCU just because the power consumption is so ridiculously low and NodeMCU + Lua is pretty easy since it has full GC and gives you a node.js-style callbacks that I think are generally easier to work with than doing it myself in C. Most of my embedded projects have moved to the ESP32 as a result.
It doesn't have to take up much space either: https://www.waveshare.com/product/rp2040-one.htm
Two separate platforms connected over USB is substantially more complicated, expensive, power hungry, and consumes a lot more space.
The value prop of SBCs is that they're compact and you can do low-level work in a single package. Connecting an RP2040 to a PC and writing software for both is the opposite end of the complexity spectrum.
Another I have thought doing is ADS-B receiver mounted outside. It helps to put the receiver close to antenna so would put the SDR and Pi in enclosure, and power it from PoE. Microcontroller can't run the SDR. Micro PC is overkill and wouldn't work in enclosure. Doesn't use GPIO pins.
Linux would probably be very easy to built without needing firmware
I've also used GPIO on a Raspberry PI Zero W to build a Stratum 1 NTP server with nearly spooky accuracy with the PPS line.
Both things worked very well. They were compact, performant, used an inconsequential amount of power, and were very inexpensive.
And both things were very easy for me to implement, largely due to the tremendous amount of software available in the Linux-ey ecosystem.
If I were trying to bodge an MCU into performing these tasks without involving Linux, I'd probably have never gotten either of them done.
the rp2040w has wifi, micropython and a bunch of GPIO, all running at low hundreds of megs. Great for motor controllers and that sort of stuff. I use them a lot for the sort of things I would have used Pis for.
However thats because its python. If you want rust, or javascript, then the pi is probably still a good option (I know there are native ports, but they are not as common or easy. )
But if you want computer vision, or, can't be arsed with micro based programms, then pi is where its at.
The other type of application is home assistant. I have an N100 running HA in a VM. It would have been easier with all the home security stuff to have it running on a pi directly. (yes you can use esp32 as binary sensors, which is what I do, but its expensive to have things that aren't wifi.)
Yes - and at the same time, the RPi has gotten more expensive, rising from ~$25 circa 2013 to $60-$80 for the latest RPi 5. Neither price including power supply and SD card. Of course the RPi 5 has more cores, a faster clock speed, more RAM, and built-in wifi so you do get more for your money.
Once upon a time, you were looking at $25 for a Pi and $250 for intel. These days it's more like $80 vs $180.
But if you specifically want to run Linux and have SPI and GPIO on the same chip then sure, the RPi will do that.
In some cases you want to avoid your programmers needing to know two designs, compiler toolchains etc - a microcontroller might push you towards using C, and perhaps all your other code is in Python and you'd prefer to keep everything in Python.
If you're making something like a high precision time server synchronized to GPS, you might want your GPIOs to trigger direct interrupts on the device with the ethernet port. Of course, IIRC the RPi has USB ethernet so it's not a good choice for a truly high precision time server.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is also very interesting for the size and $15 price tag. I also liked the 3A but no one remembers that one.
They're older, but everyone else is still playing catch-up, and Raspberry Pi will produce them for a while. I do hope they have a proper $35 board to upgrade to in the future.
There are many alternatives that, granted, don't have a community as big as RPi, but are perfectly valid and can be found at a normal price.
In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.
No GPIO pins though.
From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.
I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.
I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.
By the time you fully dress a pi now it's like $100-130. The pi itself is only like half the cost if that.
Please do tell.
It's still works but I sent mine back with an about 3 days since I couldn't do all the things I could do on a raspberry pi.
Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges.
I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job.
You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features.
If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.
There are lots of projects that need a small cheap computer that doesn't really need display.
And actually many raspberry pis are sitting around doing nothing, because people realize that they aren't interested in the embedded side of it, but the "computer" side of it is too weak to do anything useful. In that sense it is even worse than a mini PC which has enogh power to do some "real" light computer work.
And I didn't make any of this up. These are real things that I see people talk about, all the time.
No you don't. RPi5, zero upstream Linux support 7 months after release.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5
Zillion dollar (pound?) company, apparently, and they rely on some volunteers from SUSE for even basic upstreaming. If you're paying them for OS support, you're throwing out the money.
> Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
No they are not. If anything it was always RPi that was its own quirky thing.
Pretty much all of my SBCs are some form of mainline U-Boot booting mainline Linux (sometimes + a few patches) and a standard Linux userspace. Very uniform.
RPi 2+ I have is some weird bootloader that doesn't fit the wider SBC ecosystem, with its own special configuration, and a lot of RPi only tooling to control their firmware running on the graphics CPU or whatever.
If you buy a different board and things don't work your on your own.
You're rarely on your own. And even if you are, it's much easier when you have an actual detailed SoC documentation, board schematics, and when things are not some weird ad-hoc thing, but something fairly standard like U-Boot, that you already know and can re-use the knowledge of on any other board, without any vendor lock-in, etc. And when the docs are not some completely ridiculous thing that Rpi was known for years ago.
The libraries for a pi hat might only exist for the pi for example. I guess I could write my own library though.
Are you serious? :) At least compare with something like Allwinner H3/A10/... which had similar lifetime.
The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.
They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.
But IMHO, no one should be running a NAS without ECC at this point. It's on the "my RAID doesn't scrub the disks" level; it's just begging for silent disk corruption that propagates its way through backups and is impossible to fix with software solutions.
They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.
If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.
But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)
Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.
---
For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)
Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/
The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi.
And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
Especially with ESPHome making it so easy to integrate with common sensors without writing code.
That said, the Pi Zero W is pretty cheap and small (similar in size to many ESP32 development boards) so it provides a nice upgrade path if you want to do more processing on device, exceed a few megabytes of ram, etc
This has just been one of my largest pet peeves with the entire Pi lineup. The Pi 5 is the worst offender that idles at like 3 watts doing jack shit. That's an entire 3000mAh battery gone in under four hours that would've easily lasted several days on an average smartphone SOC with twice the memory and speed.
My first reaction was "Well, the OS is open -- isn't it? Just set up good power management yourself and publish it for all to use, and it'll probably get accepted upstream eventually."
But then I remembered: The OS is open, but the hardware is not (because -- in one word -- Broadcom).
But maybe with an IPO, they can generate enough cash to get their own CPU started up. Maybe something based around [checks flip-chart] RISC-V or something, with enough documentation to allow people to fix the [checks excuse card] power management problem.
They've certainly shown some willingness to work in that direction with the RP2040.
Perhaps that will change: After all, how many engineers do you know who feel motivated to hold down regular mid-tier jobs at two publicly-traded companies?
IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.
It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).
Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.
Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
No ECC memory, thus no.
And why should we let something that harms society remain legal? At the very least society ought to collect on the damages, and a company that's pushed all responsibility for deciding what is and isn't right to do onto the rest of society has no right to complain when society decides it ought to stop.
Of course there are people who want to abolish law in favour of bartering as well, but I think they think you're allowed to hit them in the face for thinking that.
Also a baseline of liquidity, rule of law, and the absence of capital controls are prerequisite.
To be honest, that actually makes a decent amount of sense, but I suspect the real reason was to enable US investors to buy into it so they do not then support attacking the foreign interloper in their industry.
This used to be mitigated by the fact that other countries would have their own pools of capital, like domestic pension funds but with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.
Surely it's the other way around? The UK pension system has been reforming recently to _encourage_ more equity holdings, especially of UK-based companies.
Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.
If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.
- Tim Cook, probably
Also, an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote, everybody prepared for the worst, but it didn't happen, at least yet. They are genuinely trying to make it better from my understanding, at least for now.
I think the biggest thread to ARM SBC ecosystem is Intel's N series systems, which can run both Linux and Windows 11 equally well. An N95 runs a familiar chipset & ISA with familiar system dynamics and standard ports with good IO performance. They can act as good home servers and entry level home computers.
Who can deny the charm of a small box with a mSATA + NVMe port, WiFi6, a proper BIOS, two screen outs backed by an acceptable GPU?
Exactly.
Pis are obviously not perfect. You can definitely find much better "deals" - but overall it is a very good product for what you're paying for.
1. Non-brickable: Either your SD Card is gone, or your board is broken. There's no middle.
2. Trusted OS: You can trust the OS from get go.
3. Customizable install with flasher: Spend 30 seconds setting up your Pi before installing it to the SD card. Doing the same setup post install takes hours in some cases.
4. Seamless migration: Poweroff Pi, get the card out, insert to newer Pi, power on, go on.
I'm not adding small yet irreplaceable features like undervoltage warning in the system logs.
I'm running a OrangePi 5B with their original Debian image. While it's not doing any shenanigans from what I see, it needs half a day to convert it from a toy with auto-login to a proper home server, and the OS is finicky. Some mounts fail during boot causing it to enter maintenance mode. Adding "nofail" to boot options makes mounts succeed on every boot.
Interesting device.
I think I can convert my spare Pi3 to a "boot to an emulator" system.
For the line of thought you replied, I would be more keen on a ESP32 instead.
Mostly true. However I did experience issues that led to less than 100% trust.
When I got my Pi 5, I ordered an NVME HAT and was thrilled to be able to run the Pi from an NVME SSD. Then one day it would not boot. The messages on the screen indicated that it no longer saw the SSD. Booting from an SD card, it also did not see the SSD. Convinced that the NVME HAT had malfunctioned, I initiated a return through Amazon and eventually acquired another. About that time I discovered that there were known SSDs that did not work with the Pi, including the one I had. IOW, a S/W update had caused a working system to malfunction. A different SSD has been working without difficulty.
I was also puzzled that the imager did not list the current version of the OS for a Pi Zero. I asked about this on the official forum and my post was removed without notification.
Also at one point, a system installed to an SD card on a Pi 5 would not boot on a 4B. That has been fixed and in fact, the 5 and 4B use different kernels. One side effect of this is that on `apt upgrade` the process tells me that a different kernel will be used on reboot. (It won't.)
The Pi 5 is a massive shift in architecture and there is still (IMO) significant technical debt that the Pi engineers are catching up with. (But not enough to cause me to look elsewhere.)
Yes, Raspbian is not 100% dependable/reliable, esp. when it comes to NVMe boot. They're trying to tune things aggresively for 5. I got three eeprom updates in two days in one case, when they were trying to tune temperature dependent clocking for RAM.
However I trust the OS to not do any backdooring/spying shenanigans since it's mostly pulled from Debian's official repositories.
However, even the OrangePi 5B uses almost the same repos with Raspberry Pi, I had to give it a purposeful dig to make sure.
I watched Jeff Geerling's video yesterday about NVMe hats, and he openly said that the firmware is picky about SSDs. In fact signalling over flex cables is problematic.
I built a BMAX-B4 N95 system for my parents to replace their big tower system. It has two SATA ports. One SATA and one mSATA. SATA port is routed to a slot via a flex cable, and Samsung's 870EVO sometimes initializes a couple of milliseconds late causing system to not to boot. I'll probably move everything to mSATA drive and let it slide, or try another brand of SSD hoping that it'll like the flex cable a bit more.
No that's not an example. Bending Spoons has not IPOed.
As of yesterday, ARM's architecture powers world's 4th fastest supercomputer Fugaku.
I do not think this changes anything in that regard. As a hobbyist I keep an eye on the competition and during Covid none of the alternatives appealed to me. I'm sure others came to different conclusions and found alternatives suitable.
The situation may be different for someone producing a product based on Pi H/W. They were treated well compared to the hobbyist market during shortages and I don't care to argue one way or the other whether this was good overall. If I was producing a product that needed something like a Pi to work, I would always be evaluating alternatives.
Once the Pi organization is publicly owned, their behavior will determine the need to talk about alternatives.
And why do you think I ask, technical reasons?
I can very well imagine the post IPO "foundation" - btw how does a "foundation" IPO? - making Pis unusable for licensing / financial reasons.
So thus, neither Arduinos nor Raspberry Pis are things that need to exist.
In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.
No GPIO pins though.
However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?
Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.
I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.
Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?
Interesting opposite: Valve
Superior money milking machine without the pressure from shareholders, because they can focus into the benefits of the end users with few products and long term sustainability.
No need to rush for increased profits every quarter so that someone can sell or admire their stocks.
Also, I don't understand games at all :)
This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.
agreed that mini HDMI is bullshit.
running a company and pricing things is a dark art. there's so much psychology to it, getting you in the door at $40, then up charging for add ons is a time honored tradition sales tactic. win or lose, judge it on the out-the-door price as long as you compare it to the out-the-door price of other options (Intel NUC, Droid, orange Pi, any NAS)
On top of that, Eben Upton has publicly made statements showing pointless loyalty to ARM and ignorance on current/past developments in RISC-V.
For Raspberry Pi to stay relevant, many things would have to change.
They should stay private and build on the quality brand they have rather than trying to grow because reasons.
In 3D printing in (say) 2019, for instance: It was ridiculously common to use a Raspberry Pi with a printer -- for all kinds of reasons. They were cheap (enough), and they worked well (enough), and they were available (enough).
Few, if any, questioned whether the Raspberry Pi was the right thing to use, for it was ubiquitous and well-understood.
But when Pis became more expensive and/or less available in 2021 or so, people didn't just stop doing stuff with their printers.
They instead found alternative platforms to do things with: They bought used corpo mini-PCs, repurposed cheap-shit Android TV boxes, used old Android phones, and (of course) trudged through the weeds getting things working various other SBCs.
So you think with fewer variants, one of those few is more likely to meet your needs? Doesn't having more variants make it more likely that one will suit you, or at least get closer?
Some choice is good. Too much choice is problematic.
This TED talk probably explains it better. https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...
Yes, because being over-specced doesn't matter if it's cheap enough.
Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
They can, of course, but it's by no means a forced choice.
Something more capital wouldn't necessarily have helped with either.
I'm using a 3B+ (or whatever) with a TV hat to convert free to air channels to IP streams that I can watch on my phone and tablet. The winning point is obviously the TV hat but also the low power consumption. It's 3.82 W right now.
I'm also using an Odroid as my home server, because there where no RPis available and because I can plug two SATA 3 disks in that machine. It's using 3.71 W. Given the load I put on it I could be OK with a less powerful server that would consume even less Watts.
Will give the average investor the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions.
there can still be potential benefits of this move for the foundation's goals. economies of scale and increased commercial embedded use cases can push for adoption of ARM in basic computing.
i just hope that they finally set up their own distribution as it is still a pain to buy their devices for a fair price.
> Raspberry Pi has a strong track record of revenue growth and profitability. For the year ended 31 December 2023, revenues were $265.8 million, with gross profit of $66.0 million, and operating profit of $37.5 million, as well as adjusted EBITDA of $43.5 million.
The filing goes on to provide various forward looking statements regarding growth and profitability. I find no mention of the original mission.
> Raspberry Pi is a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity founded in 2008, with the goal of promoting interest in computer science among young people. Raspberry Pi has distributed approximately $50m in dividends to the Foundation since 2013, which has been used to advance its educational mission globally.
These discussions are missing the larger point which is that it feels the .com side of Rpi is eating away at the original mission of the company.
Fun fact. E Upton long ago resigned from the board of the original (charitable) Raspberry Pi company and set up the commercial company now known as Raspberry Pi.
There's pleanty of information in the 'about' pages.
Time to them to dump their shares on the community.
those won't be free for long
What are some alternative boards with comparable specs?
Maybe I'm becoming bitter and cynical, but all I can see are things being ruined after IPOs and the like.