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avhception

I don't know of any other ARM device that fulfills:

- I can boot it w/o having to learn about custom U-Boot implementations

- I, as a consumer or small business, can buy

- Can not only buy today but also still buy in 2 years

- Doesn't cost a small fortune

- Can be tugged away behind TVs and other small niches

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Whenever the Pi gets brought up people on HN will tell you you are wasting money if you are not buying a Chinese Pi clone with beefier specs instead. But at least for me, "Being able to boot into a Linux system without having to dig through outdated wikis and Chinese language support forums to hunt down a google drive link to an OS image from 2021 that has since then received zero updates" is definitely worth paying ten extra dollars for.

Exactly this.

really good point, but I actually don't think the Pi's biggest competitor is Chinese clones, but just regular laptops and mini-pcs that have dramatically lowered in price over the years. I do still think Pis have a purpose though, it's just harder to justify in certain cases.

It depends on what you use your Pi for. If you are self hosting anything beyond what a Pi Zero can handle then a mini PC would most likely be a better choice than a Pi 4 or 5. If you are building embedded devices or are a hobbyist then the Chinese ARM SBCs are definitely in the competition.

Yes, it getting a lot more competitive generally. But the brand and community around PI is still A1.

Some of these Chinese 'clones' have substantially more mainline Linux support than any of the Pi boards.

You don't need an ARM, and for the same price, before the RAM crisis, you could get many tiny PCs for the same amount of money, with proper SSDs and power supplies and in tiny form factors.

https://teampandory.com/2024/09/24/gmktec-g5-mini-pc-review-...

Something like this ($155) cost less than the Pi + case + power supply + nvme addon board + ssd, and it also runs windows and any other x86 OS.

The problem here is "something like this". I may buy one of these today. Then in 6 months, I have to buy a different one. Only to find out that it's firmware has a bug. Or it uses a different ethernet chips that is a problem for me for some reason. Or something like that.

The RPi I can depend upon to be shitty as well, but in the exact same way. So it stays fit for purpose.

Not ARM, but:

https://www.gmktec.com/products/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-perf...

If ARM is a requirement, then RPi is your only option that I know of.

But also seems to cost ~twice as much.

I understand wanting to run a local LLM for privacy, but on something more powerful. Yes it's costly but what use is an LLM on a cheap board?

I was mostly responding to

> [...] if I want some low power linux PC replacement with display output, for the price of the latest RPi 5, I can buy on the used market a ~2018 laptop

I guess. I don't care about the AI hat at all.

Depends entirely on the model you want to run.

There are some absolutely useful things you can do with TTS/STT/Diarization/etc on even really minimal specs.

Some of those will run fine on RPis even without this new hat.

The extra ram probably opens the door to a large number of vision/image models, which typically want a minimum of 16Gb, but do better with 24/32.

There are just a HUGE number of case specific models that do just fine on hardware at the RPi level, assuming you have the ram to load them.

Odroids!

Do they still need a custom kernel?

Why does it need to be ARM?

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