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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years.

They haven't lost it. Their goal was to kickstart something and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The space has moved - a usable computer now demands a lot more than the original Pi, and they realized that - this is why their tinkerer platform is the RP2040 family. The market is very healthy and the ESP32 family has a huge space.

What RPi brought was the idea that a platform with good software support would allow for a revolution in the space above the power of an Arduino.

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You might've skimmed over the rest of my comment, but my focus was on another type of tinkerer - and maybe that was my bad, I guess "lite homelabber" might have been a more apt description. Raspberry Pis used to be huge among people who wanted a low power device to host useful services. I myself was one of those people once. I never used the GPIO pins, but even today a Pi is my DNS (PiHole) and Home Assistant server. It was a great device to serve as an intro to self-hosting, but with where they've taken pricing and as you said, where the market has gone, they've become all but irrelevant in that space.

But again, you're assuming that that's a bad thing. In fact if they were still doing the same thing that they were 14 years ago it would mean that they had failed their mission of helping bring low powered devices to the underprivileged. They jump started a market that has created dozens of competitors that are competing to provide the best value for the lowest price to the market with their own niche fits and geo locations and sourcing deals, etc, etc.

It’s a bit like saying the OLPC project failed. Their hardware was never ubiquitous, but they lit a fire under the seats of the industry giants that caused things like netbooks and the modern laptops built almost specifically for schools (cheap, indestructible, easy to maintain), and many schools save resources by getting students electronic versions of their books.

I use one of those myself when I don’t want to carry dead weight.

Of course, I’d love if the OLPC project lived up to their promise, but that was the stretch goal.

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