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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

I think the conclusion here is that Raspberry Pis are now too pricey (especially when factoring in the various required accessories) and rarely make sense for typical desktop use vs. x86 mini-PCs. They make even less sense compared to various used thin clients that can generally be found on eBay.

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You're paying a premium for physical compatibility with a ton of niche accessories. Whether or not they make sense depends on how important those accessories are to your use case.

That and the prices never really came back down to earth after the chip shortage hikes.

> You're paying a premium for physical compatibility

No. There are a bunch of alternatives with some to full pin compatibility. Some being many times faster [1]. No new projects should use a new Raspberry Pi.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQ5ascBuCw

Your video rates the PI as 10 for support, 10 for ease of use and 7 for performance. Just the support and ease of use is enough. You're paying for a mature ecosystem where you know things work and you don't have to waste time struggling.

Unless they want to keep going without needing to swap things out frequently and deal with the extremely poor support that most alternatives get.

Thanks for the video. I just bought a RPI5 and was curious if this was a mistake, but after watching the whole 'I love PI' video, I am still okay with my choice.

It is good to know that there are other boards with better multi-thread performance and AI capabilities. However, there are also a few things I disagree with in the test setup, such as rating only multithread performance and giving the best single-thread performance the lowest overall rating. In addition, concluding the AI tests without the extension board for the RPI5 seems a bit weird.

So thank you for the video, but I think it depends on what you are trying to achieve and it is not a simple there you get more bang for your buck.

> You're paying a premium for physical compatibility with a ton of niche accessories.

Maybe this is the new narrative, but it wasn't how the Pi was initially developed and marketed.

It's just a touch too expensive for the use cases many hobbiest have.

It would make a lousy desktop computer even if it was 10x as powerful.

- high current 5V USB power supply you probably don't have

- HDMI micro port you have like 1 cable for

- PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable + hodgepodge of adapters

- more adapters needed for SSD

- no case, but needs ample airflow

- power input is on the side and sticks out

GPIO is the killer feature, but I'll be honest, 99% of the hardware hacking I do is with microcontrollers much cheaper than a Pi that provide a serial port over USB anyways (and the commonly-confused-for-a-full-pi Pi Pico is pretty great for this)

> PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable

We had a problem trying to bring up a couple of Pi 5, hoping they'd represent something reproducable we could deploy on multiple sites as an isolation stage for remote firmware programming. Everything looked great, until we brought one somewhere and untethered it from ethernet, and we started getting bizarre hangs. Turned out the wifi was close enough to the PCIe ribbon cable that bursts of wifi broadcasts were enough to disrupt the signal to the SSD, and essentially unmount it (taking root with it). Luckily we were able to find better shielded cables, but it's not something we were expecting to have to deal with.

I never really understood how GPIO is a killer feature with them. There are so many ways to get GPIO, from $5 USB dongles to any microcontroller/dev board that's ever exists. What's special about Raspberry Pi GPIO that I'm missing?

The only case I can think of is very heavy compute that relies on low latency GPIO related to that compute?

The low latency is the reason why the PiStorm (Amiga CPU accelerator) project works so well on a Pi 2, 3 or 4. (Pi 5 is no longer suitable since the GPIO is now the other side of a PCI-E bus and thus suffers significantly higher latency than on previous models, despite being much faster in terms of throughput.)

In general the best part of the Pi is that it's so stable as a platform. Everyone has the same hardware and generally the same OS so guides online just work - it may be one of the if not the best Linux on the desktop experience I've used personally.

Along with that the gpio is there and ample so it's extremely easy to just start using it.

I do argue an esp 8266 or esp32 are better for a development microcontroller but you have to muck with cabling it up before you can even load a program on it which is a few more extra steps than a Pi

If it's a funky esp board, possibly. The esp8266 and esp32 boards I've used all have usb sockets for programming.

I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300.

It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to play with the gpio).

I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a decent development machine for me, considering my development starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and running vim.

The whole lot is tiny and extremely portable, we pack it away in a draw when not in use.

All in it felt like good value for money for something that took about 3 minutes to get up and running.

You can get much more powerful PCs for much less, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CFPRDQY8/

That's actually about the same price as the pi 500+ without the screen. Except that one has 500gb Vs 256gb SSD, but doesn't have the snazzy led keyboard.

Processor comparison too

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...

For desktop use cases, sure. But the Pi's target market is makers and educators who want small and efficient and can interface easily with peripherals like cameras and GPIO. Desktop users and low-end home labbers are a distant second.

Small yes, efficient no. It's more or less on par with comparable minipcs in power draw, needs an active cooler and idles at over 3W. That's more than a Pi 2 uses going flat out. They keep increasing power draw with marginal efficiency gains and don't bother to do much power management. It's absolutely atrocious compared to the average smartphone SoC.

I really hope there's some kind of battery oriented low wattage high efficiency version planned someday, because we're up to requiring a 5A power supply and it's getting absurd.

> I think the conclusion here is that Raspberry Pis are now too pricey

This blog post shows a $2000 GPU attached to a slow SBC that costs less than 1/10th of the GPU.

It’s interesting. It’s entertaining. It’s a fun read. But it’s not a serious setup that anyone considers optimal.

You think an RTX 5090 only costs $2000??

It does if you can get an RTX 5090 Founders Edition from Best Buy or Nvidia.

(I've been trying for a year with no luck - a few times I've gotten on the wait list for a purchase, but never successfully.)

Have you heard any anecdotes about someone who isn't a reviewer obtaining a RTX 5090 Founders Edition? I haven't.

I think the Pi still makes sense when you actually want a Pi

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