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> And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone with a computer project started buying out their reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not part of the plan from the start.

I go into this in my previous comment that I linked above, but I think it was a shitty product for that niche too. The original non-microSD version had massive problems with the SD cards slowly softening and deforming enough to cause unreliable contact with the socket, which was one of the failure modes that caused corruption.

Another were the power brownouts, etc. People forget because usb chargers have gotten so much better over the years but 10 years ago a regular usb charger could generally not run a raspberry pi stable under load. Worse, it would appear to be stable and just silently corrupt the SD card due to voltage brownout (writes don't "stick"). Today we are seeing the same problem with the RPi 5s, where they have simply exceeded the capability of what can be delivered at 5V and aren't reliable.

You could not even PXE boot them without having a SD card installed to provide the blobs, so there was no getting around this at the time.

Pointing to the "you can pull the SD card and reflash it!" as being some kind of massive advantage is ignoring the massive downsides the SD card brought with it, again especially until they finally switched to microSD so the cards didn't melt and warp. I cannot fathom someone trying to run a computer lab on raspberry pis, that would have fucking sucked.

I partly agree, the RPi Zero W is my ideal small physical computer with a full OS. Running it only from the overlay filesystem (to keep those terrible SD cards from becoming corrupted). Pi-Hole I run from a docker container on a fanless NUC-a-like. But for anything that needs GPIO, the Zero W is great (nice that this Radxz has a RP2040 built in to cover that).

The ECS Liva X is 10+ years old, it’s a product I bought in 2014. You’re seeing elevated prices from scalpers who are selling stock of a product that was discontinued 8 years ago, buying a new-in-box GTX 760 is going to run you a premium as well.

At the time, I bought one Liva for $100 and then two Liva Xs for $125 each a year or so later. All of them were 2gb memory/32gb emmc models.

I like to use a single remote for both my TV and Kodi, and the raspberry pi has the CEC HDMI thing which makes it possibke. It's not that common in SBCs AFAIK.

Had the same problem when moving from a RPi to a mini PC, and solved the problem using this external dongle: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

Unfortunately it's not cheap, although the same functionality could be offered by a USB equipped small microcontroller "sniffing" 2 wires from a pass-through HDMI port.

RPi is the only ARM SBC that I've seen good broad support for. You can run their Linux distro as well as mainline distros. Every other SBC I've tried has required some boutique distro with custom drivers that weren't generally available or worse still, just didn't work.

I will say, when the scalping of RPi happened over the pandemic, a lot of the x86 mini-pcs became a much better option in terms of TCO. I invested a bit into DeskPi cases for 8gb RPi 4b models. In the end, a $150 or so N100 box is a much better deal, with the case, psu, memory and storage. But it, of course, depends on what you're doing or trying to accomplish.