this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have "lost its way".
I'd argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.
Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.
But nowadays pis are in the no man's land between. They're priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.
I'm not sure, how that's supposed to be sustainable.
Industrial applications... This is now their market, not tinkerers.
They are too slow and unreliable for the industrial market though. If you have money you can just buy X86.
Industrial is not all high tech or efficiency driven.
It's about cost and availability. They probably buy in bulk, have some Linux image with the exact setup they need. Then they just replace them if they break with little to no downtime.
For smaller bulk-use applications there's microchips like ESP or Teensy. For larger applications there's X86.
For a cost effective pi alternative there's Rockchip stuff.
There are tons of them in the industrial market. The entire shortage of them was from prioritizing the industrial market.
The entire shortage was because of Covid19
And then putting the shortfall into the industrial market, which is an important fact when countering the idea that Pi's aren't used in the industrial market.
They have fulfilled their mission with the first Raspbi, everything after is extra.
The pi3B+ and pi4B are still $35 for the 1GB models and have the same performance today that they did when they came out (and way more compatible software).
If all you're doing is setting up a tinkering lab at a school, which everyone and their mom seems to want to do judging by the comments, you can still do that. The only thing that has changed is the entry of the sbc choices. Raspberry pi hasn't gotten worse, the market has just caught up with them to some degree and that's fine.
Maybe it's just them not being sold here officially, bit I have NOT seen those for $35. They're all closer to $100.
I literally just went to the links provided by the Buy Now buttons on the raspberry pi website and they're all there.
I feel like there's a Mandela effect thing going on with how people remember the price of pis several years ago. If anything, because of inflation, pis are cheaper now than when they released.
Well, "buy now" would not work here, that's the point. Neither of the resellers listed (one does indeed list the low price) ships here.
Oh my god. Where are you located? I'll literally look it up for you.
FFS.