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> Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds.

For the RPi 5, for fully reliable operation, you need an oddball 5V/5A power supply, which is not actually a standard device. IMO Raspberry Pi messed this one up. At the price point, either use a barrel jack or support USB-PD for real. (The latter would be great for many use cases, because the same conversion circuitry would enable driving from a wide voltage range. A tiny cheap ESP board can do this — why not a rather pricey Raspberry Pi?)

It is part of USB-PD though, it is just a recent addition (PPS) that isn't that common yet.

I agree it isn't ideal, but you shouldn't blindly buy a PSU to any computer. Extra easy mistake to make when it is USB-C though.

PPS is getting more common. Quite a few phones need PPS for fastest charging so seeing more chargers that support it. It is still cheaper to buy official charger but barely. And there are multi-port chargers where might be able to support multiple Pi5.

The Pi cannot negotiate PPS. It needs the profile to be a default offering, which is extremely rare.

I can’t find any evidence that RPi5 supports PPS or that anyone makes a 5V/5A PPS charger, except perhaps a massive 100W charger or something along those lines. It’s a silly voltage/current combination.

edit: PPS is not supported. See:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=359918

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/497

Thanks for the correction!

Oh, so it needs a 5A power supply. The problem is that usually requires a >60W supply, which will be willing to provide 5A. It also requires a marked cable. I think it can legally be done with PPS if power supply supports 5A.

It is weird that Pi5 doesn't do USB-PD 27W supply which is common. It would require converter from 9V. But that would cost money.

The problem is that the Pi requires specific combination of (5V && 5A), which is rare. IIUC even many 65W adapters don't support it.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Pi is shipped as a bare board without case. Power circuits are sometimes required to have enclosures.

> but you shouldn't blindly buy a PSU to any computer

Make up your mind.

Or you don't need to bother with RPi PSUs or you shouldn't blindly buy a PSU to any computer.

It's even more ridiculous what you were proven wrong in your assumptions about RPi PSU.

It wasn't my assumptions that was wrong, my research (early days of the Pi5) suggested it. Which matches the github issue where the belief was that PPS was supported.

But even if that was the case you shouldn't blindly buy one where the specs match.

Is it good quality, is it made for 24/7 operation, does it get hot etc.

In the Pi case it is quite simple. The official one isn't expensive and it is ubiquitous. It runs fine on most supplies though if you need one in a pinch. But I do recommend going for the official one for long term use.

> Using an old second hand power supply is enough to turn me away.

It's a standard 19V laptop power supply. Any laptop supply will work with that HP device and they're just as easy to find as any other power supply.

Well for one, they have an normal HDD interface.

The worst part of a Pi is the SD card. It's truly the worst interface to use for booting off. Extremely unreliable and due to kernel bugs, having your system on an SD card is extremely unstable. (but that is more of a Linux issue than an Pi issue).

I found RPi to be unusable for anything remotely serious. Recently I got RPi 5 with NVMe hat. Had a lot of "fun" finding drive that will actually work with it, so more money and time spent. Got it working and found that it randomly dies after couple of days. The time and money spent I probably could be better off just getting one of those N100 mini PCs.

For dabbling with electronics Pico or STM32 seem more reasonable. RPi GPIO is too limited for anything that could use its processing power. Not sure if there are even any distributions that would support realtime operations with those pins or things like DMA, custom protocols working at 1x-1xx MHz speeds.

You can get new Mini PCs for not much more than a Pi 5, especially if you want an 8GB model, case etc. $150-$200 will get you an okay bottom barrel Intel PC with support for stuff like SATA and M.2 SSDs which are more annoying to have on the Pi.

And $150 is overstating it. Look up ‘n3350 all in one’. Lots of models and retailers selling these atm. Intel must be selling these cpus for a few cents given the price for these complete systems with storage ram, case and power supply is ~$65 even when not on sale.

N3350 is nearly ten years old and I suspect a lot of the ultra cheap "new" systems using it are actually using salvaged parts.

I honestly don’t get it at all considering the sheer volume of these on the market right now. Is there any chance intel would run off an old low cost design that doesn’t compete with the high end just to keep the 14nm fabs busy? It seems like there’s too many on the market for salvage alone to explain it.

Not exactly salvage, but more like buying in volume from government entities trying to liquidate either actual surplus or fairly new but legally required retired machines. The feds go through the GSA, state and local do their own thing for the most part. It's not unusual to see agencies attempt to sell multiple palettes of computers or just about anything you can imagine for next to nothing. Example: https://www.gsaauctions.gov/auctions/preview/288722

I personally disliked dealing with federal agencies, but entities as local as a school district can easily have a palette of relatively new machines, sans hard drive, and are far more flexible in payment and how you choose to get it to you. For a brief period I used to rent a truck and do weekly runs from Brooklyn mostly to Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania and get back to my one bedroom with 90-120 computers. At the palette level prices can get down to the $10-$20 each machine level (probably higher now due to inflation), hard drives aren't really that expensive either. The biggest headache was shipping but the process is likely far more streamlined today. Of course, it probably would've been even cheaper if I didn't operate out of a tiny 1 BR in Brooklyn and can actually own a vehicle and have reliable parking It's not exactly my tax dollars at work, but effectively it is a sort of subsidized sale at the taxpayer's expense, Intel isn't really selling anything for pennies on the dollar, but pretty much every municipality and county government will, at least at some point.

The mini-pc market for those HP machines is fairly in demand and you can get them very well priced.

They're fantastic as a low cost machine with decent specs that take up minimal room, they're also usually corporate devices in which there are plenty of drivers that work well out of the box.

I bought one to act as a home server and it works flawlessly running Proxmox, over the machine I built many years back which was slower and bigger.

I just think comparing the Raspberry Pi to these Mini-PC's is just a silly comparison to begin with.

I don't see what's wrong with old second hand power supplies. These corporate mini PC's are manufactured in such large quantities, that finding them in good condition from reliable sellers isn't exactly hard.

For most self-hosting purposes mini-PC's are often the best option in my opinion, because they're small enough in size and low in power consumption to be comparable to raspi, but powerful enough for stuff like running a virtualization environment, and support containers that are only for x86. Admittedly I did go for desktop though, because I wanted more storage, dedicated GPU and ECC RAM, but for lots of people a single mini-PC could host everything.

I still like raspberry pi for doing small things where I want redundancy, like running DNS server that stays up even when I do maintenance on my main server. And obviously it's great for embedded projects and such.

Everytime I used a pi the cabling ended up being a mess. A regular computer usually have all ports on one side only, and possibly additionnal usb / trs on the other side. On the PI power/hdmi/TRS is on one side, usb/ethernet on another, GPIO on another and more easily accessible from the top. This is my major PITA concerning the PIs.

In the end most of the gains made from the small footprint are lost because the actual physical footprint increase from the number of cables you have to attach to it from all sides.

I use two of them (Lenovos) in my small homelab. They take up 1U side-by-side so they’re great if you have limited space.

> I don't see the appeal of using these mini-PCs.

Suprise - you are not the ones who do.

> Using an old second hand power supply is enough to turn me away.

> And the PI has many advantages. Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds'.

This is a quite a stupid argument.

a) it's totally the same for any other PC: you just order another 'in literally seconds'

b) if you don't like a second hand PSU then order a new one in the first place

> And meanwhile I wait for it to arrive I can use a spare notebook charger or whatever

... just like you can have a compatible charger for a mini-PC ?[0]

> For a home server I would recommend something beefier, an old desktop will be superior to any mini-pc and the Pi

For most of the people there is no need in 'beefier', 32Gb RAM, 256-1024Gb SATA/NVMe is all they need.

> The point of a Pi for me is more that you can have it where you need it. Attached to your TV or whatever.

Anyone can have mini-PC where they need it. It's because they are mini, not a desktop ones.

[0] by the way, most of the time those mini-PCs have a notebook style external PSUs (not some anemic square brick of 15W) and they are quite rare to break

The argument was that you already have a PSU at home. Or in my small town I can get one in 15 minutes, or order it and have it delivered tomorrow.

On the contrary, the notebook style external PSUs are more likely to break and much harder to find replacements to. When it has happened to me the best source to buy has been to order it from another country.