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Comment by Saris | Hacker News Reader

I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.

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This (the 16GB version) should not fit into most use cases. You’re buying an expensive RAM chip with a Pi attached.

The cheaper 4GB or even 1GB versions ($50 for the latter) are what most people should be looking at for their projects.

I have decided that the Pi4 1GB is the ideal for hobbyists. Faster than Pi3, takes normal USB-C charging, and can do most single server or electronics jobs. Which is why it is currently sold out.

I agree... I use a Pi4B 8GB as a home server with a number of duties.

Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.

My personal fave RPi, the Zero W, is still $15 from Adafruit.

I really wish they made a new Zero that doesn't use ddr2 ram to ensure that it can still be made far into the future. As far as I'm aware, nobody is making ddr2 anymore

DDR2 is absolutely still made - there are industrial embedded applications that can't use anything else.

Is anyone making DDR5?

For AI, sure

Mostly HBM; uses more or less the same production lines so has displaced most DDR5 production.

The original vision IIRC was to provide a cheap computer for students in low-income families. You could plug into your TV at home and start learning.

Then the hobby community got wind of it and proceeded to buy out all the stock on every release (myself included, I still have one of every first 3 versions sitting in my cabinet)

At this stage I think the way to realize this "cheap computer" vision is in unlocking smartphones. Either with an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone, or with an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS.

"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/

"an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.

There is an unbelievable amount of e waste created because OEMs locked the software down and stopped updating it. I have an android tablet which is functionally working but effectively useless.

I have been trying out the FX1s. It is a good replacement with some rough edges still. Better battery life than previous Pixel 6a and Fairphone 4.

Dock can not handle an Ultrawide 1440x3440 display.

Right now it is a backup phone and my music player.

https://furilabs.com/

The 80s kid in me still thinks dropping someone into a linux shell with a bunch of tools and no internet access is the best learning environment. Kids these days with their fancy tiktoks and such need to summon the old ways.

The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...

> What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...

Probably nothing. That free info also comes with YouTube and TikTok and every TV show and movie and game on demand. You have to be very disciplined to focus on difficult topics in a sea of easier and more gratifying entertainment.

The concept of a cheap new computer like an RPi for poor families is a 1st world solution that doesn't understand markets. Used computers are way more popular in countries where the price of new computers are out of reach.

It's a supply chain problem, n

This was over 10 years ago, and the original price was something like £35.

It was tiny, and the assumption was correct - most families had an HDMI capable TV and could afford the device and a usb keyboard.

A used PC still needs a desk and a monitor. This was far more accessible.

In 2014 I bought a used RM desktop PC for my parents for £50 from eBay, which came with the tower, keyboard, mouse and all cables. I had an old monitor laying around, but again, easy to pick up if needed. They still use it today.

People have been saying this for years, yet Raspberry Pis just keep on selling with no trouble.

RPis get sold more to the businesses and startups that started with them in 2010s, rather than hobbyists now.

If you cannot negotiate a good deal with the big industrial silicon manufacturers but you want good up-to-date kernels, RPis are a perfect option.

There are SoMs or SBCs with other CPUs like NXP or MediaTek that has more or less mainline support. However, they ask more money. The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel issues that the CPU and the board manufacturer missed.

There are also lots of cheaper SoMs if you're not allergic to Chinese chipsets, and the cheaper ones tend to have PoP on-package DDR so you can spin your own 4-layer PCB without having to pull your hair out impedance matching DDR3+ traces. That, of course, if you can fit into ~64MB RAM.

> The kernel contributions are also a bit on the shakier side which requires spending expensive developer time to deal with kernel

NXP/i.MX are way better at mainline kernel than Broadcom that RPi is based on, come on.. and they have cheaper options like i.MX 9 series. Other vendors, yes, mainline support could be pretty spotty.

Raspberry Pi’s keep selling because the software ecosystem is solid.

Yeah they do keep selling, I wonder though if hobbyist sales have dropped.

You should really look at the Pi Zero 2 W. Similar capabilities to the 3B for <$20. The Pico 2 is also cheap and very capable if you don't actually need Linux. Most projects don't need a Pi 5.

Yeah that's why I have so many ESP32-S3's around, no project I've done actually needs Linux and the boot times and SD card problems that come with using a Pi.

The value and capabilities of ESP32s are incredible. Most projects I see that use Linux to drive a GPIO would be better served by an ESP32 almost every time. They can even be coded using Arduino, and LLMs can produce Arduino code easily. The boot instantly, consume extremely little power, and are so small they make even a PI Zero look like a giant brick.

> 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN

> Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), onboard antenna

Oof ... BLE 5 has some huge improvements over 4.2. BLE 5 stuff has been on sale for almost 10 years now ...

Hopefully this gets a refresh soon.

It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.

And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.

It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.

Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.

If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.

If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?

You don't seem to get it.

SBC Customer: Let's say I build a product using your latest SBC. Will it get updates after I bought it?

SBC Vendor: No

SBC Customer: Okay, but surely I can at least buy more in 2035?

SBC Vendor: No

SBC Customer: Why would anyone building a commercial product be interested in your particular SBC then?

SBC Vendor: We expect you to buy and then regret your purchase.

Most of the people buying raspberry pis are industrial customers who are not on the fence about whether to buy an SBC or someone’s trashed PC.

What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.

They're relatively common in industrial applications now because they have really good software support and great long-term availability.

This effect plays around again and again. Someone makes something for the public good, and corporations show up and take advantage of it. Basically the story of FOSS too, when you think about it.

They launched the compute module which was intended for industrial use a mere two years after the first Pi.

The corporations are paying for the product. The pi foundation could invest that in to making more and developing the product further.

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