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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability

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...

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No, it was absolutely about affordability and education. Pi was never about compute power, it was focused on a general purpose CPU that ran Linux and had I/O that enabled tinkering.

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...

This was also the appeal, despite using binary blobs and some incredibly unfortunate design decisions (ethernet over USB for example), people loved these little things because they were cheap to a fault- intended to be almost disposable for education purposes. All can be forgiven with cost saving as the goal.

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.

If I was teaching kids I would reach for CircuitPython and one the many many RP2040/ESP32 boards.

It's just so much fun.

I think the real differentiator is support. There is so much hardware and software support for Raspbery Pi. This is why I use them.

It's something like "the iphone" of SBCs at this point. Many others are using it and writing about it specifically, and it's pretty damn commodity. If you break one, another can (since the supply crunch) be sourced pretty quickly and easily and just dropped in where the old one was.

They committed to manufacture each Pi models for a number of years. This is important for those building a product around it.

False. I was an early adopter and the price was the main point of RPi - there were also more powerful and expensive boards from different companies.

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