You develop your application on an 8GB model and find out that 16GB is much better. You can choose to port it to some other OS with some other hardware if you like or buy a 16GB Pi 5 and save the effort. The choice is now there.
What's so great is that it's all up to you. There are "smaller" or older Pis still being made. More for more is fairly reasonable.
If you have a sort of inbuilt bias against "buying second best" that you might consider this a price increase. I have that feeling often. I don't want the second best camera .... and that ends up leading me into stratospheric prices as I finds better and better things. Fortunately I know this and realise that when I am doing it it's because I don't have a clear use in mind for the item - hence I can't decide what's "enough" so the answer is not to buy it at all.
The lesson I've learned over the years of purchasing several Raspberry Pi's is this: Unless you're in the need to integrate a project through the GPIO's interface I would be better off spending on one of those (second hand) mini-pcs by lenovo, dell, etc. Even if you want to use it for a low budget mini server, performance for the buck is way better off with a mini pc.
For GPIO on mini PC you can use USB-GPIO adapter. Under Linux it can be used like native Raspberry's GPIOs.
Raspberry is great when one learns or needs a typical, embedded platform. I'm using Raspberry to learn about Kernel, drivers, bootloaders, etc., but I wouldn't use it as my local server/home automation computer. For this, I have a second-hand HP T630 that I bought for $46, and works great.
How does Raspberry teach anything about bootloaders? It's probably unique, it functions completely different compared to all other bootloaders and it's closed source.
I migrated most of my self-hosted services from multiple rpi (I've been using several of them for years) to a single cheap Intel N100 NUC that I purchased last year: 16GB RAM/512Gb SSD for 156€, and I've been very pleased with it.
You lose some resilience when you do that - if the NUC fails then you lose everything. Whereas if you distribute your services across multiple rpis then a failure of one rpi is not catastrophic.
The current (expensive) RPi is almost never the right choice. For IoT you have Espressif boards and for higher performance you have mini PCs. The main advantage of RPi was its cost, that's why it got popular. Now that the main factor is gone, the rest like the ecosystem etc. is not that important anymore.
I thought the same and ended up with a gigabyte BRIX now collecting dust, because there is no way to convince that UEFI, besides USB ports, that SATA and M2 SSD drives are thing, one year of wasted effort, because I wanted to be clever instead of getting a Pi.
Also the place where I acquired it no longer exists, hence why I got stuck with it.
Yes I should have known better, but it is as it is, and we learn from our mistakes.
Yes, those are of course valid points as well. However you also need to consider that you have to spend money on other things as well: the power adapter & the SD card to at least have a bare minimum (and a case maybe if you are not a careful person with electronic stuff).
Two things that actually annoy me is that SD cards are way way slower than other storage options and are very prone to corruption, I've lost not critical data, but data that was still useful to me due to SD cards (even I believe if you purchase them from a known manufacturer). So this implies that you will likely want to have another more reliable storage option to keep critical data backed up (more spending). And the other one is the missing power button. I don't know if that has changed but all the models that I own lack of a power switch button.
The Raspberry Pi has been a bad deal for a long time now. Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP) and for some reason they never came back down.
Cheap tiny PCs are better at the high end, and increasingly-capable microcontrollers are better for tinkering. The Pi sits in a weird niche, and its popularity these days is largely based on inertia and network effects.
It's been a slow, strange shift away from a $25 computer meant for kids to learn programming and electronics.
The popularity is now mainly based around the software support and the product lifecycle.
With a lot of other SBC (single board computers) you're lucky to get a very of the Linux Kernal which works in the first place. The likelyhood it will get upstreamed or kept up-to-date with upstream is basically zero in most cases. Raspberry Pi has great software support and the original Pi 1 has only just become end-of-life and unsupported by Raspberry Pi OS at the end of last year.
There is also clarity on when the hardware will be produced until. For the Pi 5 for example they've commited to it still being produced until at least 2036.
Those together mean that if you're using it in industrial, educational, or embeded settings then you can depend on the board lasting a good while longer than other options which might become insecure and useless before the hardware itself fails.
This is slightly less of an issue for hobbyist who are running Homelabs or personal projects on SBCs.
I own a company that sells BeagleBones, Jestsons, LattePandas, in the past Bananna Pi and other cheap and cheerful Chinese embedded boards. What sets the Raspberry Pi apart from its peers is the software stability. None of the others come close to it (okay, maybe the latte panda does)…
> for some reason they never came back down
That simply is not true if you buy from an authorised distributor. Authorised distributors are required to sell at MSRP.
All of this is true but many of the competitors don't support their products after launch. If you want a product that will be supported by software into the future there aren't so many alternatives.
You can buy a Pi5 2GB today for $50 (or sometimes slightly less) and that is really their premium product line.
Model As, picos, Zero Ws etc are all cheaper than that original PI price after adjusting for inflation and are typically more flexible in form factor and better CPU too.
> >Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP)
> I see a lot of people say this, but I never saw this happen in the UK.
Also UK. There was definitely a time (late 2021, early 2022) lasting some months when most RPi products were only easily available from resellers (I'm using that word charitably) at vastly marked up prices (at least as a home user just wanting a single unit or small number of units, it may have been different as a bigger buyer).
I have a Pi400 where a Pi4 (or 3 or older) would do just as well, because at the time I needed it for some reason the Pi400 hadn't yet been affected by the shortages (and resulting scalping) and was far cheaper to buy new (even with the full starter kit which included PSU & mouse) than any Pi4 despite nominally being more expensive. I think the 400 was even on offer below RRP at the time. The Pi400 became hard to find at RRP soon after I bought mine, I have a friend who was looking a short time later.
The shortage may have lasted longer than I'm remembering, as I only paid particular attention for a bit longer than the time of my own & my friend's needs.
I agreed to mentor a Google Summer of Code project using a RPi before I realized that I couldn't easily get one myself, spent the whole summer checking the UK official reseller's websites and eBay, lost interest after that and still haven't got one.
The bigger question to my mind is why does 14GB of RAM cost $70?
2GB Pi5 - $50
16GB Pi5 - $120
I can see the uses of having more RAM, but surely it's cheap enough to make 4GB standard, with options for 8/16GB that are sensibly priced - removing one SKU.
The problem is that to fit on the existing board, you need a single RAM package with the same number and function of pads. Looking at a sample photo of a board, I can see it has a Micron package labelled D8CJN. Looking that up on Micron's FBGA parts decoder, the full product code is MT53E2G32D4DE-046 WT:C which is a 64Gb (64 gigabit, i.e. 8 gigabyte) LPDDR4x RAM at 2133 MHz, in a 200-ball TFBGA package.
Looking at Micron's range, they now have a 128Gb (16GB) chip with matching specs, which is the MT53E4G32D8CY-046 WT:C. That chip costs £74.66 per chip from Mouser Electronics (just one site I found selling it) in quantities of 1,360.
In contrast the 2GB chip - which I surmise is a MT53E512M32D1ZW-046 - costs £9.26 each in quantities of 250. There's a price break listed for 2,720 of the things, but I'm not going to ask for a quote.
So that's £65.40 more for the larger RAM chip. Which is about $80 on today's mid-market exchange rates.
Looking at the 4GB it's probably a MT53E1G32D2FW-046, which is £16.72 in bulk quantities of 1,360 from the same wholesaler (for the revision C part). So that's an extra £7.46 or about $9.
Why are other systems' RAM upgrades cheaper? Largely because they use more chips, and therefore each chip has less capacity. That means either the chip is less dense, or it's a smaller die, so fewer defects are likely within the one chip, making yields higher. An SO-DIMM might have two or four chips on it, depending on whether it's populated on one side or both; a full-size DIMM might be 8 or 16 (or 9 or 18 if it has ECC).
Obviously I've made the assumption that this is just a drop-in replacement chip on the existing board. But I assume it would be very hard to redesign the board to fit in the same form factor, with all connectors in the same positions, but add on another RAM chip. If the SoC even supports driving more than one RAM chip, which it may not.
TL;DR that's what Micron charge for the larger chip.
There's no way that's what RPI are paying, or even close - it should be somewhere around $7 or so for a 4GB part, $3.60-4 for a 2GB part.
If we use your prices above just as a "scale" then you can already see here that 1X 4GB part is cheaper per GB than 2GB, so as I say it's around $3 in cost to upgrade the base model from 2>4GB.
Yes, and there is cost in maintaining an extra SKU.
It would cost about $3 to make the 2GB RPI5 a 4GB PI5, and you might save something close to that by removing a SKU. You then get a bunch of new applications (which need more RAM) for your SBC and your product sells more as it looks better value. On the whole that $3 is now looking like a bargin.
I don't think 32GB is needed or sensible, so will disagree there.
Actually $9 more to go from 2GB to 4GB, just for the RAM chip itself. See my reply above.
32GB is impossible at present. No-one makes a 256 gigabit (32x8) chip to fit in the same footprint, so then you have to do a new board design to support multiple chips, which might not be doable in the board's current footprint.
Micron do a 192 gigabit (=24GB) chip but it's LPDDR5, rather than LPDDR4x, which I imagine the RPi 5's SoC can't drive.
If you look at all their accessories, particularly the country-specific customisations for keyboards and power supplies, Raspberry Pi now offers an incredibly large range of SKUs.
Not necessarily. They can have a target margin of X% which is completely reasonable. Then they lower X for the lower RAM options and increase X for the higher RAM options. That way more people can buy your product, as many will be fine with less RAM. And the ones that really need that much RAM will contribute more to the margins needed for R&D and marketing.
I can't believe that people are still surprised about this kind of pricing, because it's completely normal pricing strategy in almost every market. If this is greed, then I guess greed is simply wanting to be able to run a viable business, and wanting as many customers as possible to be able to afford your products. It's basic price discrimination, and personally I think it's a good thing.
I suspect when you're selling at the quantities that Apple are doing, they'll have to consider the impact their RAM pricing will have on RAM shortages. If they price the highest RAM option much cheaper, everyone will just buy that option, even if they don't need it. At those volumes, that could trigger the need to build new RAM factories, which will drive up RAM prices a lot in the short term, which is rather self-defeating.
They have to make money somehow, it means selling things for more than they pay for. They chose to make higher margins on the 16GB model than on the 8GB or less models, which is not particularly shocking.
They listed last summer, so now have public company incentives - I get it.
However given the cost of RAM is quite cheap, sales are slower after the initial Pi5 rush and there are a number of competitors would it have been much better for the company to say
4GB is entry level for $50,
8GB for $65,
16GB for $95
Would they have sold more units? Improved the range of software that can run on a RPI, increasing demand further?
It's probably targeted at inspirational buyers who don't actually do anything with their boards but want to have the latest and greatest - whaling.
Anyone who knows what they're doing is capable of using a cheaper Allwinner or Rockchip SBC or flashing a supported Android TV to Linux because SBCs are for some reason pricier than the same SoC that comes with a plastic box and power brick.. or even (gasp) to run their blinky LED off a $3 Aliexpress ESP32 board.
Charity and trading company were/are separate (as practically required, in the UK)
A charity can't really trade in the same way a company can. For example a charity can't register for VAT (sales tax).
The way it normally works is that a charity exists which takes donations and does charitable stuff, then a seperate company exists which makes money and sells stuff (does trade) and it happens to be run by the same folks, and donate money to the charity (or have some kind of 75% of our profits get donated to charity) promise. That's super trivial to unwind as the charity often has no formal ownership over the trading company, it is really just a beneficiary.
To be fair to the raspberry pi group, I think they were in a difficult position and the whole thing was getting much, much bigger than they ever had anticipated.
On the grapevine, they had more money than they knew how to get rid of in accordance with their very narrow charitable objectives.
The bit that feels dishonest is they share a brand, and publicly present themselves as a charity, and actually it's for personal gain. Sure they dotted their i's, but it seems like the key difference between the RPI foundation and the Captain Tom Foundation[1] is they have better lawyers.
I'm in Hungary and for the equivalent of $120 you can get an enterprise refurbished mini PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo) with a much better CPU (i3-8100T, i5-8500T, i3-10100T for example) and storage options here. I'm running Dell Optiplex Micros with triple SSDs (1x 2.5", 2x NVMe). And it's x86 so you can prety much run whatever OS you want without any problems. The power consumption is perfectly fine too. Mines usually idle around 4-5W.
When my Macbook Pro suddenly died while I was travelling, I was surprised I could productively use my Rpi4+ that I had with me as a temporary replacement. I set up VSCode to use Remote-SSH, and was doing all compilation/development on a cheap Vserver (<15€/mo). VSCode ran quite well locally on the RPI. This was a good temp. replacement for a couple of weeks, now I keep my RPI as an emergency device with me in case my main laptop dies again.
A Dell U2414h 24" - cost 220€ over 10 years ago. It is 1080p, can be detached from the stand with a single button press and fits easily into my Osprey 80l backpack (its more a suitcase than a backpack). For protection I guard the screen-side with a piece of cardboard that is cut to match its size - then make sure to place the screen against the backpack framing and secure it with the straps that are in the backpack.
I travel with a mouse but no keyboard, had to buy one real cheap.
If I needed to use a RasPi as a computer for a few weeks, I would just go to some electronics store and get a USB keyboard for 5$. But if you're buying a monitor (while travelling!), you could just buy some cheap Laptop to use.
I always travel (as in digital nomading for months, staying 14+ days in a single location) with a monitor (see my other explanations in that thread) because not only is a laptop screen to small for extended work, it is highly unergonomic to look down all the time.
There is a whole market now of portable monitors that are intended to be used as a secondary laptop monitor when travelling, or as a bigger monitor for a switch or steam deck.
I've been toying the idea of replacing my aging macbook with one + an M4 mac mini - the situations where I need to use the computer on battery are relatively rare, and it'd be substantially cheaper.
To be honest, I don't know who buys these portable monitor. Any cheap Dell 24" (I use an old 2414h but newer are the same) for ~250€ will do. They detach from the stand using a button press (Dells proprietary mount system), have almost no bezel, and are relatively flat to fit into a suitcase or even backpack. I use an Osprey 80l travel backpack, and that 24" screen is easily placed at the very back of the backpack.
I even sometimes use a bigger suitcase with wheels, I can fit 2 screens in that suitcase easily and use a Dell MDS19 stand - the pro for this stand is, you can unscrew the bottom (no screwdriver needed!) and it is just a very thin flat piece. The other part is also basically just a long heavy bar with the monitor mounts, but in total it is easier than to transport the two individual stands.
RK3588S has been available for several years and supports 32GB RAM. OrangePi 5 uses it and sells with 32GB RAM. NanoPi M6 uses it and sells with 32GB RAM for $192. I'm still using an $35 BCM2835 RPi with 512MB RAM. Boots to RAM-based root filesystem; .profile automatically chroots to a large external drive.
I totally concur. This is actually our main usage on a set of 4 rpi4 and rpi5, building up ARM docker images from our products and run all testing from CI. Yes, I could use ARM-based VPS, but we wanted our own in-house CI running.
Before that, we were testing Rancher with these ones for ARM testing, too. No miniPC right now offers that, but I think they will be coming soon.
Outside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.
Just finally putting my model B version 1 into action. Cost £10. *
It is doing everything I want: running https, http, websockets, and monitoring a USB device using python. No GUI. I tried on an esp device but it proved to be too hard to keep those plates spinning. It's the right device for the right job. That's the rule.
I've ranted about this before on HN so won't too much now, but suffice to say over the years I've tried to use a Pi for multiple different projects, and it's very rare that anything ever just works, even following apparently clear tutorials. I always run into issues somewhere installing packages from the linux and/or python ecosystems.
If all you need is a base Raspbian install, fair enough; but anything more complicated and you're likely heading for a world of hurt, trying random 'solutions' from years-old Ubuntu forum and StackOverflow posts.
I use rpi zero 2 as a coding server (paired with my iphone and a splitted keyboard) when I have slow or no internet. It's quite usable if you just mosh/ssh into it and use emacs/vim to code.
What everyone is missing with NUC suggestions is that none of them are ARM based, which is a selling point to get a Pi and port software to ARM in what is a convenient desktop experience.
Many of these comments seem to ignore all the advantages of the the rpi ecosystem like footprint, direct IO integration and arm and simply focus on CPU through put O_o
a closer comparison would be the sbc with n100 chip. they are roughly same price
but n100 sbc offer much better performance, and power consumption as well
> I managed to get my N100 mini pc to 1.3-1.5W idle power consumption at wall with active wifi connection (screen turned off), so for headless server idling most of the time the N100 is better option.
We had this discussion with the 8GB Pi 5, at which time I argued that a mini PC (I got a Minisforum UM480[0] with a mobile Ryzen 7 8C/16T with 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe for a ~£260 on sale) is in another league performance and feature wise while not costing as much more than a Pi as you'd think once you factor in the cost of the Pi + cooler + uSD + PSU + case + NVMe base/HAT + NVMe SSD.
I've been a fan of the Pi since the beginning, and in the SBC world, their support is unmatched, but with these improvements, they're speccing themselves more into homelab/server/desktop use than straight tinkering/GPIO stuff, all while the prices are pricing them out of that market.
If you don't want to annihilate the performance of a Pi 5 like the Minisforum mini-PC does, you can buy a complete N100 mini-PC for ~£100 with all of the RAM, storage, case, IO and PSU included that will still destroy a Pi 5 and actually cost you less up-and-running and still get better performance.
It always struck me as odd that people use default config Windows power consumption figures for the N100 boxes. My 14 year old Sandy Bridge laptop can pull 1-2W idle on Linux with a modern desktop; a more modern SoC with fewer parts would be broken if it can't do that.
(I often bring out that old ThinkPad X220 to test software on older hardware, and it's so satisfying how fast that thing still is until you open the browser.)
IMHO The 5 should have been a separately-branded product line because it's not the best fit, cost-wise for someone just doing blinky, sensory, roboty stuff that would work fine with a 3 or 4.
I recently needed some tiny server to bridge a printer to airprint / network scanner etc. Immediately thought about rpi as I could simply plug it in and probably tape it to the back of said printer indefinitely. Seeing the ridiculous pricing on new PIs, went ahead and grabbed a NUC like mini PC. I mean it was the same price as an rpi + memory card, had a nice case with a fan, power management etc. Has shit specs but what do I care for this use case.
If I don't need GPIO, PI does not seem to make much sense anymore.
There is definitely a market for it - though a small one.
I had a 3x pi cluster and found the 8GB limiting. So made those the controlling nodes and bought orange pis 32gb for the worker nodes. And those were well north of 120.
But that kind of usage case is quite niche. For most people minipcs are probably a better fit in that price class.
I'm unconvinced by the LLM argument...even if the model fits...it's already slow for 8GB class models.
Second hand NUCs cost 70 bucks, sometimes even lower and offer way more bang for buck than a RPi. Use an adafruit breakout for usb -> GPIO and you're good.
Yeh, just load the RPI software image on and follow all the guides and.. oh.. yeh it's slightly different in small ways that could trip you up. Great, I love making myself more work.
For tinkering and GPIO stuff I still think the Pi is unmatched, but with the specs of these newer models and the prices, they seem to be entering more of the homelab/desktop/server segment, at which point these mini PCs we're talking about are a far better value proposition.
If you want to connect breakouts and do some electronics work etc, a Pi 4 or a lower-RAM/lower-cost Pi 5 is an excellent choice, for those who were using them to host software like I've been doing mini-PCs destroy Pis these days at the price/feature and price/performance level.
If the Pis weren't looking more like these mini PCs in features and cost, they wouldn't be coming up as comparisons.
Newsflash, Raspbian is just another Linux distro, which means you can still follow the same tutorials on other distributions, Debian is the closest. Unless you play with drivers, bootloaders, Kernel hacking, or try to integrate with another embedded platform, you wouldn't see a much difference.
More news just in: you and I won't see much/any difference because we've done this (playing with computers) before, many times I expect.
But I appreciate some of you left your Pis in the sock drawer and are unaware of the seemingly obvious (to you) things that learners trip up on. I spent years maintaining a Pi-based audio player aimed at beginners. I even tried to support some other platforms, should have been "simple" but the little differences matter to those that don't know what's little and what's big.
I should probably give some examples but I guess this is a case of what's obvious to me, isn't to you.
Of course I use Raspberry, as I already mentioned - it's great for learning typical embedded stuff. But if the use-case is different than embedded, and more like a server or PC, then just go with PC. I too frequently see people putting too much effort into turning a small SBC into a fully-fledged PC, with a poor effect of course.
Unless you need a small form factor and GPIO, I don’t think the Raspberry Pi is a good deal anymore. A Raspberry Pi, SSD, case, and power adapter would be much more expensive than well-known N100 mini PC brands like Beelink and Minis Forum. However, they still have low power consumption. So my answer is no. (Was a happy RPI4 user but now much more happy with mini pc's)
I think that the deal for a pi zero is still pretty unbeatable. I run one as a backup DNS at home if my primary goes down. With a poe splitter and a sensor unit (co2) it draws about 1w.
That means about $2 a year where I live. My second best computer - a hp mini computer - draws 11w at idle. Meaning $22/year. At a service time of 5 years a pi does make sense.
I wouldn't. I bought all RasPi boards from 1 to 4, which served me for tinkering and as media player, then realized I could do the same for cheap on a much faster mini PC or unlocked Chromebox, and when I need GPios there's a good choice of cheaper/faster and more open boards from other vendors.
Also tabbed web browsing. I tend to line up the YouTube vids I want to watch while coffee brews, then watch with coffee in hand. Sometimes they get left there for the entire day, minimized while I do something more productive. At least with chromium, that takes a lot of memory (even though it does a few things to conserve). I also have a few other applications running all the time. It gets pretty close sometimes.
Anyway, now that they're available, I'm getting one. I sure have a lot of Pis nowadays.
One reason: your project is already designed around the RPi form factor, and/or you already take advantage of things like GPIO that are more specific to a Pi than a "mini PC" or whatever. And it would cost enough (in actual dollars, or just in time/energy/attention/etc) to redesign the project to where it makes more sense to just upgrade to the slightly more expensive Pi.
These tiny PC with 4" boards have changed the game. Pi is sort of in-between the Arduino and these. As article points out the price difference is not much.
I bought 4B and found it slow, hot. Thanks to COVID I could resell it for a tidy profit lol. Of course there are use cases I can imagine.
I always wondered - why do we usually need to build software for a target architecture/system on the same architecture/system? Unless the build includes tests, it doesn't need to be run?
I get that Apple has its own BS reasons for that, but Linux?
> why do we usually need to build software for a target architecture/system on the same architecture/system?
Because that's the path of least resistance in terms of development, at least unless you need to industrially build for many architectures. If the compiler runs on $ARCH, the output runs on $ARCH, I guess there's some exception but it's that, an exception.
> Unless the build includes tests
Build should indeed include tests, unless you want to ship software that potentially fails in architectures you claim to support.
Cross compiling isn't a first class citizen in many languages, and when it is, cross testing usually isn't, but you can have a toolchain that includes qemu (as a vm or as a dynamic binary translator) to cover those cases.
Generally you will always have some system dependencies that you have to manage at the host level. It’s easier to manage those dependencies in the same way the consumers would, in my experience.
Containers make this a ton easier of course but then you’re building in a container and you probably wanna make that container match your target environment, soooo…
Cross compilation is much less tested so it's not uncommon to have hidden bugs in the package's build system that break cross compilation. Or that developers straight up disregard cross compilation if they're e.g. hand-rolling Makefiles.
At least for Nix you _can_ cross compile, but cross compiled and native compiled derivations are not identical - so if you go the cross compiled route you will end up building everything.
Another option is to use Qemu and binfmt_misc - that way you do get the result of "native" compilation, but it's slow.
Is there a similarly priced, more powerful ARM based computer available (for power efficiency I would like ARM only)? A year ago I decided to go for a mac mini for around $500 as it's way more powerful (except for RAM, there it's constrained but that's ok if you don't attach a display).
I've been saying this for almost 2 years now. The raspberry pi was awesome when it first appeared. But given the competition today, especially the Intel mini PCs from one million vendors on Amazon, it became a relic of the past for all but a handful of applications - and these wouldn't need the 16gb model.
What makes me sad is the relative failure of the 400/500 concept. I miss the portable all-in-ones from the 80s. But the difficulty in putting a SSD inside and the infuriating mini HDMI were the nail in the coffin.
I love the idea of low power computing, but I have seen rpi 2 and 3 fail so many times (microsd technology is unreliable, cpu fries at room temperature, gpio randomly stops producing voltage) over the years, no idea why this brand still exists and sells products. Maybe it is just me.
Indeed - used vs. new of course, but if you're using it for raw compute, and you don't have like a 10W upper limit to your power budget (e.g. not remote solar/battery powered), a used mini PC is going to get you a lot more performance, IO, and compatibility, for a lower price (not to mention a case, power supply, and likely included SSD).
Definitely not less; used mini PCs typically idle at 10-20W on the low end (and some, especially older AMD, at 30-40W which seems insane!).
Even the better low-end N100's usually idle at 5-6W, which is double the Pi 5.
SoC idle temperature depends on environment and cooling solution; the N100 would quickly thermal throttle if you don't have a comparatively large heatsink attached. The Pi 5 will actually give you full performance for a minute or two before throttling (assuming no heatsink).
Other Arm chips are much better, efficiency-wise, but the Pi 5 is still more efficient than any low-end x86 build, especially used.
My NUC11 with 8 GB of DDR4 and Ethernet idles at 3-4W when I tell it to not power any status LEDs. Can be power-limited in BIOS so that it runs off of a USB-C power adapter with a fixed 19V negotiation cable.
But it is not low-end for sure. I'm kind of wasting the computer on this use case. It's just what I had after Pi 1B turned out not being enough.
Hi Jeff, I feel that for just a few watts idle extra you get a much more capable, and much more complete, easy-to-handle computer, at this time the Raspberry Pi starts to feel like, why do we still even care? let the industry customers have them.
I’m sure you have many more topics and a ton of other gear to explore to explore and many pi-related videos are fun entertainment (which is fine for it’s own sake) but it always practical.
That 4-SSD nas looks fragile as hell and I think it’s definitely worth exploring alternatives.
On US Amazon, the GMKtec G3 Plus is an even better deal, right now it's $140, though that's with 8GB of RAM instead of 16 (16 GB model is $210). There's even a $10 coupon bringing it down to $130/$200 currently.
You develop your application on an 8GB model and find out that 16GB is much better. You can choose to port it to some other OS with some other hardware if you like or buy a 16GB Pi 5 and save the effort. The choice is now there.
What's so great is that it's all up to you. There are "smaller" or older Pis still being made. More for more is fairly reasonable.
If you have a sort of inbuilt bias against "buying second best" that you might consider this a price increase. I have that feeling often. I don't want the second best camera .... and that ends up leading me into stratospheric prices as I finds better and better things. Fortunately I know this and realise that when I am doing it it's because I don't have a clear use in mind for the item - hence I can't decide what's "enough" so the answer is not to buy it at all.
In addition, the second-best product is then perceived as cheaper as it would be if it were assessed in isolation.
This sounds like I could have written it. Fighting gear acquisition syndrome in photography is a real challenge.
"Gear Acquisition Syndrome" (GAS) is an awesome term for it :-)
The lesson I've learned over the years of purchasing several Raspberry Pi's is this: Unless you're in the need to integrate a project through the GPIO's interface I would be better off spending on one of those (second hand) mini-pcs by lenovo, dell, etc. Even if you want to use it for a low budget mini server, performance for the buck is way better off with a mini pc.
For GPIO on mini PC you can use USB-GPIO adapter. Under Linux it can be used like native Raspberry's GPIOs.
Raspberry is great when one learns or needs a typical, embedded platform. I'm using Raspberry to learn about Kernel, drivers, bootloaders, etc., but I wouldn't use it as my local server/home automation computer. For this, I have a second-hand HP T630 that I bought for $46, and works great.
How does Raspberry teach anything about bootloaders? It's probably unique, it functions completely different compared to all other bootloaders and it's closed source.
I totally concur.
I migrated most of my self-hosted services from multiple rpi (I've been using several of them for years) to a single cheap Intel N100 NUC that I purchased last year: 16GB RAM/512Gb SSD for 156€, and I've been very pleased with it.
You lose some resilience when you do that - if the NUC fails then you lose everything. Whereas if you distribute your services across multiple rpis then a failure of one rpi is not catastrophic.
The current (expensive) RPi is almost never the right choice. For IoT you have Espressif boards and for higher performance you have mini PCs. The main advantage of RPi was its cost, that's why it got popular. Now that the main factor is gone, the rest like the ecosystem etc. is not that important anymore.
I thought the same and ended up with a gigabyte BRIX now collecting dust, because there is no way to convince that UEFI, besides USB ports, that SATA and M2 SSD drives are thing, one year of wasted effort, because I wanted to be clever instead of getting a Pi.
Also the place where I acquired it no longer exists, hence why I got stuck with it.
Yes I should have known better, but it is as it is, and we learn from our mistakes.
Or need low power, ARM, small form factor, GPIO, or ability to load your software to a compute module.
Yes, those are of course valid points as well. However you also need to consider that you have to spend money on other things as well: the power adapter & the SD card to at least have a bare minimum (and a case maybe if you are not a careful person with electronic stuff).
Two things that actually annoy me is that SD cards are way way slower than other storage options and are very prone to corruption, I've lost not critical data, but data that was still useful to me due to SD cards (even I believe if you purchase them from a known manufacturer). So this implies that you will likely want to have another more reliable storage option to keep critical data backed up (more spending). And the other one is the missing power button. I don't know if that has changed but all the models that I own lack of a power switch button.
I agree it would be ideal to have a mini m2 slot, sata port or similar. You can at least now buy HATs.
Lets be honest many people will have old/spare/extra phone/laptop chargers that they can use to power a Pi. SD cards are cheap, a few dollars.
The Raspberry Pi has been a bad deal for a long time now. Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP) and for some reason they never came back down.
Cheap tiny PCs are better at the high end, and increasingly-capable microcontrollers are better for tinkering. The Pi sits in a weird niche, and its popularity these days is largely based on inertia and network effects.
It's been a slow, strange shift away from a $25 computer meant for kids to learn programming and electronics.
The popularity is now mainly based around the software support and the product lifecycle.
With a lot of other SBC (single board computers) you're lucky to get a very of the Linux Kernal which works in the first place. The likelyhood it will get upstreamed or kept up-to-date with upstream is basically zero in most cases. Raspberry Pi has great software support and the original Pi 1 has only just become end-of-life and unsupported by Raspberry Pi OS at the end of last year.
There is also clarity on when the hardware will be produced until. For the Pi 5 for example they've commited to it still being produced until at least 2036.
Those together mean that if you're using it in industrial, educational, or embeded settings then you can depend on the board lasting a good while longer than other options which might become insecure and useless before the hardware itself fails.
This is slightly less of an issue for hobbyist who are running Homelabs or personal projects on SBCs.
I own a company that sells BeagleBones, Jestsons, LattePandas, in the past Bananna Pi and other cheap and cheerful Chinese embedded boards. What sets the Raspberry Pi apart from its peers is the software stability. None of the others come close to it (okay, maybe the latte panda does)…
> for some reason they never came back down
That simply is not true if you buy from an authorised distributor. Authorised distributors are required to sell at MSRP.
The MSRP has gone up, though - the 1GB Pi 4 was introduced at $35. The cheapest Pi 5 is $50 (albeit with 2x the RAM).
Secondarily, mini-PCs are much more readily available at better prices now, which makes the Pi look more expensive in comparison.
All of this is true but many of the competitors don't support their products after launch. If you want a product that will be supported by software into the future there aren't so many alternatives.
You can buy a Pi5 2GB today for $50 (or sometimes slightly less) and that is really their premium product line.
Model As, picos, Zero Ws etc are all cheaper than that original PI price after adjusting for inflation and are typically more flexible in form factor and better CPU too.
>Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP)
I see a lot of people say this, but I never saw this happen in the UK.
All of the official sellers sell it at MSRP.
> >Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP)
> I see a lot of people say this, but I never saw this happen in the UK.
Also UK. There was definitely a time (late 2021, early 2022) lasting some months when most RPi products were only easily available from resellers (I'm using that word charitably) at vastly marked up prices (at least as a home user just wanting a single unit or small number of units, it may have been different as a bigger buyer).
I have a Pi400 where a Pi4 (or 3 or older) would do just as well, because at the time I needed it for some reason the Pi400 hadn't yet been affected by the shortages (and resulting scalping) and was far cheaper to buy new (even with the full starter kit which included PSU & mouse) than any Pi4 despite nominally being more expensive. I think the 400 was even on offer below RRP at the time. The Pi400 became hard to find at RRP soon after I bought mine, I have a friend who was looking a short time later.
The shortage may have lasted longer than I'm remembering, as I only paid particular attention for a bit longer than the time of my own & my friend's needs.
I agreed to mentor a Google Summer of Code project using a RPi before I realized that I couldn't easily get one myself, spent the whole summer checking the UK official reseller's websites and eBay, lost interest after that and still haven't got one.
I think that's because during the shortage, they still reserved production lines for companies building products out of Pis.
Ditto
The bigger question to my mind is why does 14GB of RAM cost $70?
2GB Pi5 - $50 16GB Pi5 - $120
I can see the uses of having more RAM, but surely it's cheap enough to make 4GB standard, with options for 8/16GB that are sensibly priced - removing one SKU.
The problem is that to fit on the existing board, you need a single RAM package with the same number and function of pads. Looking at a sample photo of a board, I can see it has a Micron package labelled D8CJN. Looking that up on Micron's FBGA parts decoder, the full product code is MT53E2G32D4DE-046 WT:C which is a 64Gb (64 gigabit, i.e. 8 gigabyte) LPDDR4x RAM at 2133 MHz, in a 200-ball TFBGA package.
Looking at Micron's range, they now have a 128Gb (16GB) chip with matching specs, which is the MT53E4G32D8CY-046 WT:C. That chip costs £74.66 per chip from Mouser Electronics (just one site I found selling it) in quantities of 1,360.
In contrast the 2GB chip - which I surmise is a MT53E512M32D1ZW-046 - costs £9.26 each in quantities of 250. There's a price break listed for 2,720 of the things, but I'm not going to ask for a quote.
So that's £65.40 more for the larger RAM chip. Which is about $80 on today's mid-market exchange rates.
Looking at the 4GB it's probably a MT53E1G32D2FW-046, which is £16.72 in bulk quantities of 1,360 from the same wholesaler (for the revision C part). So that's an extra £7.46 or about $9.
Why are other systems' RAM upgrades cheaper? Largely because they use more chips, and therefore each chip has less capacity. That means either the chip is less dense, or it's a smaller die, so fewer defects are likely within the one chip, making yields higher. An SO-DIMM might have two or four chips on it, depending on whether it's populated on one side or both; a full-size DIMM might be 8 or 16 (or 9 or 18 if it has ECC).
Obviously I've made the assumption that this is just a drop-in replacement chip on the existing board. But I assume it would be very hard to redesign the board to fit in the same form factor, with all connectors in the same positions, but add on another RAM chip. If the SoC even supports driving more than one RAM chip, which it may not.
TL;DR that's what Micron charge for the larger chip.
There's no way that's what RPI are paying, or even close - it should be somewhere around $7 or so for a 4GB part, $3.60-4 for a 2GB part.
If we use your prices above just as a "scale" then you can already see here that 1X 4GB part is cheaper per GB than 2GB, so as I say it's around $3 in cost to upgrade the base model from 2>4GB.
That's not expensive these days. Apple would charge about £200 for 8GB more...
It's not expensive because apple severely overcharges for pitiful amounts of ram. What?
Heh don't look at NVIDIA and prices for more VRAM!
I agree. The 2gb skew is borderline useless in most applications you wouldnt just use a pico these days.
(I would even line a 32gb skew but realise that is unreasonable for the current soc)
Yes, and there is cost in maintaining an extra SKU.
It would cost about $3 to make the 2GB RPI5 a 4GB PI5, and you might save something close to that by removing a SKU. You then get a bunch of new applications (which need more RAM) for your SBC and your product sells more as it looks better value. On the whole that $3 is now looking like a bargin.
I don't think 32GB is needed or sensible, so will disagree there.
Actually $9 more to go from 2GB to 4GB, just for the RAM chip itself. See my reply above.
32GB is impossible at present. No-one makes a 256 gigabit (32x8) chip to fit in the same footprint, so then you have to do a new board design to support multiple chips, which might not be doable in the board's current footprint.
Micron do a 192 gigabit (=24GB) chip but it's LPDDR5, rather than LPDDR4x, which I imagine the RPi 5's SoC can't drive.
No, I can see in 10K volume it's a bit over $3, and RPI will be paying less for sure.
Even if we look at farnell for a qty of 50..
https://uk.farnell.com/micron/mt53e512m32d1zw-046-wt-b/dram-...
50 - £9.29 EX VAT
https://uk.farnell.com/micron/mt53e1g32d2fw-046-wt-a/dram-1g...
50 - £12.04 EX VAT
Those are public prices (not even account price) for buying only 50, and there's ~$3 difference even there.
If you look at all their accessories, particularly the country-specific customisations for keyboards and power supplies, Raspberry Pi now offers an incredibly large range of SKUs.
Greed
Not necessarily. They can have a target margin of X% which is completely reasonable. Then they lower X for the lower RAM options and increase X for the higher RAM options. That way more people can buy your product, as many will be fine with less RAM. And the ones that really need that much RAM will contribute more to the margins needed for R&D and marketing.
I can't believe that people are still surprised about this kind of pricing, because it's completely normal pricing strategy in almost every market. If this is greed, then I guess greed is simply wanting to be able to run a viable business, and wanting as many customers as possible to be able to afford your products. It's basic price discrimination, and personally I think it's a good thing.
I suspect when you're selling at the quantities that Apple are doing, they'll have to consider the impact their RAM pricing will have on RAM shortages. If they price the highest RAM option much cheaper, everyone will just buy that option, even if they don't need it. At those volumes, that could trigger the need to build new RAM factories, which will drive up RAM prices a lot in the short term, which is rather self-defeating.
Greed, aka. running a business.
They have to make money somehow, it means selling things for more than they pay for. They chose to make higher margins on the 16GB model than on the 8GB or less models, which is not particularly shocking.
I guess so. I don't begrudge them money, but I wish they could find a better way to make it than resorting to the old apple business model.
Because Raspberry Pi is trying to IPO
They listed last summer, so now have public company incentives - I get it.
However given the cost of RAM is quite cheap, sales are slower after the initial Pi5 rush and there are a number of competitors would it have been much better for the company to say
4GB is entry level for $50, 8GB for $65, 16GB for $95
Would they have sold more units? Improved the range of software that can run on a RPI, increasing demand further?
It's probably targeted at inspirational buyers who don't actually do anything with their boards but want to have the latest and greatest - whaling.
Anyone who knows what they're doing is capable of using a cheaper Allwinner or Rockchip SBC or flashing a supported Android TV to Linux because SBCs are for some reason pricier than the same SoC that comes with a plastic box and power brick.. or even (gasp) to run their blinky LED off a $3 Aliexpress ESP32 board.
They did in June.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/RPI/raspberry-pi-h...
Can someone explain to me why they're even allowed to do this? I thought they were a charity.
Charity and trading company were/are separate (as practically required, in the UK)
A charity can't really trade in the same way a company can. For example a charity can't register for VAT (sales tax).
The way it normally works is that a charity exists which takes donations and does charitable stuff, then a seperate company exists which makes money and sells stuff (does trade) and it happens to be run by the same folks, and donate money to the charity (or have some kind of 75% of our profits get donated to charity) promise. That's super trivial to unwind as the charity often has no formal ownership over the trading company, it is really just a beneficiary.
To be fair to the raspberry pi group, I think they were in a difficult position and the whole thing was getting much, much bigger than they ever had anticipated.
On the grapevine, they had more money than they knew how to get rid of in accordance with their very narrow charitable objectives.
The bit that feels dishonest is they share a brand, and publicly present themselves as a charity, and actually it's for personal gain. Sure they dotted their i's, but it seems like the key difference between the RPI foundation and the Captain Tom Foundation[1] is they have better lawyers.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/21/captain-tom-...
I'm in Hungary and for the equivalent of $120 you can get an enterprise refurbished mini PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo) with a much better CPU (i3-8100T, i5-8500T, i3-10100T for example) and storage options here. I'm running Dell Optiplex Micros with triple SSDs (1x 2.5", 2x NVMe). And it's x86 so you can prety much run whatever OS you want without any problems. The power consumption is perfectly fine too. Mines usually idle around 4-5W.
Good article about the same topic https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a... Even a 10 years old i5-6500 is outperforming the RPI5!
You generally don't want RPi for general purpose computing. It's power is the simplicity of all the embedded devices to hook to the GPIO pinout port.
When my Macbook Pro suddenly died while I was travelling, I was surprised I could productively use my Rpi4+ that I had with me as a temporary replacement. I set up VSCode to use Remote-SSH, and was doing all compilation/development on a cheap Vserver (<15€/mo). VSCode ran quite well locally on the RPI. This was a good temp. replacement for a couple of weeks, now I keep my RPI as an emergency device with me in case my main laptop dies again.
What do you use as a monitor? Hotel TV?
A Dell U2414h 24" - cost 220€ over 10 years ago. It is 1080p, can be detached from the stand with a single button press and fits easily into my Osprey 80l backpack (its more a suitcase than a backpack). For protection I guard the screen-side with a piece of cardboard that is cut to match its size - then make sure to place the screen against the backpack framing and secure it with the straps that are in the backpack.
I travel with a mouse but no keyboard, had to buy one real cheap.
and keyboard!
If I needed to use a RasPi as a computer for a few weeks, I would just go to some electronics store and get a USB keyboard for 5$. But if you're buying a monitor (while travelling!), you could just buy some cheap Laptop to use.
I always travel (as in digital nomading for months, staying 14+ days in a single location) with a monitor (see my other explanations in that thread) because not only is a laptop screen to small for extended work, it is highly unergonomic to look down all the time.
There is a whole market now of portable monitors that are intended to be used as a secondary laptop monitor when travelling, or as a bigger monitor for a switch or steam deck.
I've been toying the idea of replacing my aging macbook with one + an M4 mac mini - the situations where I need to use the computer on battery are relatively rare, and it'd be substantially cheaper.
To be honest, I don't know who buys these portable monitor. Any cheap Dell 24" (I use an old 2414h but newer are the same) for ~250€ will do. They detach from the stand using a button press (Dells proprietary mount system), have almost no bezel, and are relatively flat to fit into a suitcase or even backpack. I use an Osprey 80l travel backpack, and that 24" screen is easily placed at the very back of the backpack.
I even sometimes use a bigger suitcase with wheels, I can fit 2 screens in that suitcase easily and use a Dell MDS19 stand - the pro for this stand is, you can unscrew the bottom (no screwdriver needed!) and it is just a very thin flat piece. The other part is also basically just a long heavy bar with the monitor mounts, but in total it is easier than to transport the two individual stands.
As someone once said "the network is the computer".
They still say it today, as someone made me aware, Cloudflare bought the trademark.
RK3588S has been available for several years and supports 32GB RAM. OrangePi 5 uses it and sells with 32GB RAM. NanoPi M6 uses it and sells with 32GB RAM for $192. I'm still using an $35 BCM2835 RPi with 512MB RAM. Boots to RAM-based root filesystem; .profile automatically chroots to a large external drive.
> But I distilled my thoughts into a list of 5 reasons the 16 GB Pi 5 ought to exist:
Another reason why one might want to buy one is as a build server for arm64 packages.
I totally concur. This is actually our main usage on a set of 4 rpi4 and rpi5, building up ARM docker images from our products and run all testing from CI. Yes, I could use ARM-based VPS, but we wanted our own in-house CI running.
Before that, we were testing Rancher with these ones for ARM testing, too. No miniPC right now offers that, but I think they will be coming soon.
My response on the other article:
Outside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.
Just finally putting my model B version 1 into action. Cost £10. *
It is doing everything I want: running https, http, websockets, and monitoring a USB device using python. No GUI. I tried on an esp device but it proved to be too hard to keep those plates spinning. It's the right device for the right job. That's the rule.
* I am willing to corrected about the price!
... oh, and of course I am using those exposed GPIO pins.
> And for stats nerds, the pricing model for Pi 5 follows this polynomial curve almost perfectly
If you actually use the memory as the input instead of 1, 2, 3, 4 then a line would fit it perfectly (40 + 5x).
That was bothering me as well, the RAM simply costs $5 per GB.
BTW, market price for LPDDR4 is around $0.66 per GB:
https://www.elinfor.com/pricecenter/lpddr-c-23
A great illustration of price discrimination at work: https://upfront.com/thoughts/all-customers-are-not-created-e...
Those listings are measured in gigabits, not gigabytes. So it's $1.50-$5 per GB depending on size.
I reversed the division :(
“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make it wiggle its trunk.”
Impressive that he fitted against 1,2,3,4 and not the memory as input. That's a total blunder.
I should probably stop reading the article at that point, being aware of the the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
A masochist.
I've ranted about this before on HN so won't too much now, but suffice to say over the years I've tried to use a Pi for multiple different projects, and it's very rare that anything ever just works, even following apparently clear tutorials. I always run into issues somewhere installing packages from the linux and/or python ecosystems.
If all you need is a base Raspbian install, fair enough; but anything more complicated and you're likely heading for a world of hurt, trying random 'solutions' from years-old Ubuntu forum and StackOverflow posts.
I use rpi zero 2 as a coding server (paired with my iphone and a splitted keyboard) when I have slow or no internet. It's quite usable if you just mosh/ssh into it and use emacs/vim to code.
What everyone is missing with NUC suggestions is that none of them are ARM based, which is a selling point to get a Pi and port software to ARM in what is a convenient desktop experience.
Bingo
Many of these comments seem to ignore all the advantages of the the rpi ecosystem like footprint, direct IO integration and arm and simply focus on CPU through put O_o
a closer comparison would be the sbc with n100 chip. they are roughly same price
but n100 sbc offer much better performance, and power consumption as well
> I managed to get my N100 mini pc to 1.3-1.5W idle power consumption at wall with active wifi connection (screen turned off), so for headless server idling most of the time the N100 is better option.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/04/29/raspberry-pi-5-intel...
We had this discussion with the 8GB Pi 5, at which time I argued that a mini PC (I got a Minisforum UM480[0] with a mobile Ryzen 7 8C/16T with 32GB RAM and 1TB NVMe for a ~£260 on sale) is in another league performance and feature wise while not costing as much more than a Pi as you'd think once you factor in the cost of the Pi + cooler + uSD + PSU + case + NVMe base/HAT + NVMe SSD.
I've been a fan of the Pi since the beginning, and in the SBC world, their support is unmatched, but with these improvements, they're speccing themselves more into homelab/server/desktop use than straight tinkering/GPIO stuff, all while the prices are pricing them out of that market.
If you don't want to annihilate the performance of a Pi 5 like the Minisforum mini-PC does, you can buy a complete N100 mini-PC for ~£100 with all of the RAM, storage, case, IO and PSU included that will still destroy a Pi 5 and actually cost you less up-and-running and still get better performance.
[0]https://store.minisforum.com/pages/product (Click UM480, their website design doesn't let me link to it directly)
It always struck me as odd that people use default config Windows power consumption figures for the N100 boxes. My 14 year old Sandy Bridge laptop can pull 1-2W idle on Linux with a modern desktop; a more modern SoC with fewer parts would be broken if it can't do that.
(I often bring out that old ThinkPad X220 to test software on older hardware, and it's so satisfying how fast that thing still is until you open the browser.)
IMHO The 5 should have been a separately-branded product line because it's not the best fit, cost-wise for someone just doing blinky, sensory, roboty stuff that would work fine with a 3 or 4.
I recently needed some tiny server to bridge a printer to airprint / network scanner etc. Immediately thought about rpi as I could simply plug it in and probably tape it to the back of said printer indefinitely. Seeing the ridiculous pricing on new PIs, went ahead and grabbed a NUC like mini PC. I mean it was the same price as an rpi + memory card, had a nice case with a fan, power management etc. Has shit specs but what do I care for this use case.
If I don't need GPIO, PI does not seem to make much sense anymore.
There is definitely a market for it - though a small one.
I had a 3x pi cluster and found the 8GB limiting. So made those the controlling nodes and bought orange pis 32gb for the worker nodes. And those were well north of 120.
But that kind of usage case is quite niche. For most people minipcs are probably a better fit in that price class.
I'm unconvinced by the LLM argument...even if the model fits...it's already slow for 8GB class models.
Second hand NUCs cost 70 bucks, sometimes even lower and offer way more bang for buck than a RPi. Use an adafruit breakout for usb -> GPIO and you're good.
Yeh, just load the RPI software image on and follow all the guides and.. oh.. yeh it's slightly different in small ways that could trip you up. Great, I love making myself more work.
Why would you bother complicating things for yourself by installing Raspberry PI OS on a NUC or small pc?
Great job making yourself more work...
Now I can't follow the thousands of guides and examples tailored exactly to Pi software and hardware.
Maybe now you can see why "and you're good." isn't actually true?
For tinkering and GPIO stuff I still think the Pi is unmatched, but with the specs of these newer models and the prices, they seem to be entering more of the homelab/desktop/server segment, at which point these mini PCs we're talking about are a far better value proposition.
If you want to connect breakouts and do some electronics work etc, a Pi 4 or a lower-RAM/lower-cost Pi 5 is an excellent choice, for those who were using them to host software like I've been doing mini-PCs destroy Pis these days at the price/feature and price/performance level.
If the Pis weren't looking more like these mini PCs in features and cost, they wouldn't be coming up as comparisons.
Newsflash, Raspbian is just another Linux distro, which means you can still follow the same tutorials on other distributions, Debian is the closest. Unless you play with drivers, bootloaders, Kernel hacking, or try to integrate with another embedded platform, you wouldn't see a much difference.
More news just in: you and I won't see much/any difference because we've done this (playing with computers) before, many times I expect.
But I appreciate some of you left your Pis in the sock drawer and are unaware of the seemingly obvious (to you) things that learners trip up on. I spent years maintaining a Pi-based audio player aimed at beginners. I even tried to support some other platforms, should have been "simple" but the little differences matter to those that don't know what's little and what's big.
I should probably give some examples but I guess this is a case of what's obvious to me, isn't to you.
Of course I use Raspberry, as I already mentioned - it's great for learning typical embedded stuff. But if the use-case is different than embedded, and more like a server or PC, then just go with PC. I too frequently see people putting too much effort into turning a small SBC into a fully-fledged PC, with a poor effect of course.
That's a good point actually, especially when you're a beginner trying to follow a tutorial. Thanks for the input.
I installed Debian on mine and that was literally it, job done.
Unless you need a small form factor and GPIO, I don’t think the Raspberry Pi is a good deal anymore. A Raspberry Pi, SSD, case, and power adapter would be much more expensive than well-known N100 mini PC brands like Beelink and Minis Forum. However, they still have low power consumption. So my answer is no. (Was a happy RPI4 user but now much more happy with mini pc's)
I think that the deal for a pi zero is still pretty unbeatable. I run one as a backup DNS at home if my primary goes down. With a poe splitter and a sensor unit (co2) it draws about 1w.
That means about $2 a year where I live. My second best computer - a hp mini computer - draws 11w at idle. Meaning $22/year. At a service time of 5 years a pi does make sense.
I wouldn't. I bought all RasPi boards from 1 to 4, which served me for tinkering and as media player, then realized I could do the same for cheap on a much faster mini PC or unlocked Chromebox, and when I need GPios there's a good choice of cheaper/faster and more open boards from other vendors.
With 16gb you can run virtuals to segment CPU time with memory commits.
With 16gb you can have a massive file buffer cache and avoid disk io delay.
Also tabbed web browsing. I tend to line up the YouTube vids I want to watch while coffee brews, then watch with coffee in hand. Sometimes they get left there for the entire day, minimized while I do something more productive. At least with chromium, that takes a lot of memory (even though it does a few things to conserve). I also have a few other applications running all the time. It gets pretty close sometimes.
Anyway, now that they're available, I'm getting one. I sure have a lot of Pis nowadays.
But why use a rpi 5 at that cost?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40209801
One reason: your project is already designed around the RPi form factor, and/or you already take advantage of things like GPIO that are more specific to a Pi than a "mini PC" or whatever. And it would cost enough (in actual dollars, or just in time/energy/attention/etc) to redesign the project to where it makes more sense to just upgrade to the slightly more expensive Pi.
It's a niche use case, and other Arm SBCs do better, but Pi 5 still holds an edge for efficiency, if you're power-constrained.
These tiny PC with 4" boards have changed the game. Pi is sort of in-between the Arduino and these. As article points out the price difference is not much.
I bought 4B and found it slow, hot. Thanks to COVID I could resell it for a tidy profit lol. Of course there are use cases I can imagine.
Related:
New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642873
Arm nixpkgs build server is one reason i can think of. (But then 16gb is still almost to little)
I always wondered - why do we usually need to build software for a target architecture/system on the same architecture/system? Unless the build includes tests, it doesn't need to be run?
I get that Apple has its own BS reasons for that, but Linux?
> why do we usually need to build software for a target architecture/system on the same architecture/system?
Because that's the path of least resistance in terms of development, at least unless you need to industrially build for many architectures. If the compiler runs on $ARCH, the output runs on $ARCH, I guess there's some exception but it's that, an exception.
> Unless the build includes tests
Build should indeed include tests, unless you want to ship software that potentially fails in architectures you claim to support.
Cross compiling isn't a first class citizen in many languages, and when it is, cross testing usually isn't, but you can have a toolchain that includes qemu (as a vm or as a dynamic binary translator) to cover those cases.
Generally you will always have some system dependencies that you have to manage at the host level. It’s easier to manage those dependencies in the same way the consumers would, in my experience.
Containers make this a ton easier of course but then you’re building in a container and you probably wanna make that container match your target environment, soooo…
Cross compilation is much less tested so it's not uncommon to have hidden bugs in the package's build system that break cross compilation. Or that developers straight up disregard cross compilation if they're e.g. hand-rolling Makefiles.
At least for Nix you _can_ cross compile, but cross compiled and native compiled derivations are not identical - so if you go the cross compiled route you will end up building everything.
Another option is to use Qemu and binfmt_misc - that way you do get the result of "native" compilation, but it's slow.
With half that price (even less), I saw used but decent laptops.
Is there a similarly priced, more powerful ARM based computer available (for power efficiency I would like ARM only)? A year ago I decided to go for a mac mini for around $500 as it's way more powerful (except for RAM, there it's constrained but that's ok if you don't attach a display).
I've been saying this for almost 2 years now. The raspberry pi was awesome when it first appeared. But given the competition today, especially the Intel mini PCs from one million vendors on Amazon, it became a relic of the past for all but a handful of applications - and these wouldn't need the 16gb model.
What makes me sad is the relative failure of the 400/500 concept. I miss the portable all-in-ones from the 80s. But the difficulty in putting a SSD inside and the infuriating mini HDMI were the nail in the coffin.
I love the idea of low power computing, but I have seen rpi 2 and 3 fail so many times (microsd technology is unreliable, cpu fries at room temperature, gpio randomly stops producing voltage) over the years, no idea why this brand still exists and sells products. Maybe it is just me.
I really don’t know. A second-hand tiniminimicro or a nuc-like seems so much more value for money
Jeffs reasons why you’d need 16G in a Pi feel convoluted.
Indeed - used vs. new of course, but if you're using it for raw compute, and you don't have like a 10W upper limit to your power budget (e.g. not remote solar/battery powered), a used mini PC is going to get you a lot more performance, IO, and compatibility, for a lower price (not to mention a case, power supply, and likely included SSD).
Can you give some example? I mostly also care about energy efficiency. How much energy would the alternatives consume?
Here is a data point: my mini PC server idles at around 5 watts, including external HDD. (At sustained 100% load it goes to 30W)
Probably less - RPis these days run very hot (60C+) even when idling due to rather poor power management.
Definitely not less; used mini PCs typically idle at 10-20W on the low end (and some, especially older AMD, at 30-40W which seems insane!).
Even the better low-end N100's usually idle at 5-6W, which is double the Pi 5.
SoC idle temperature depends on environment and cooling solution; the N100 would quickly thermal throttle if you don't have a comparatively large heatsink attached. The Pi 5 will actually give you full performance for a minute or two before throttling (assuming no heatsink).
Other Arm chips are much better, efficiency-wise, but the Pi 5 is still more efficient than any low-end x86 build, especially used.
My NUC11 with 8 GB of DDR4 and Ethernet idles at 3-4W when I tell it to not power any status LEDs. Can be power-limited in BIOS so that it runs off of a USB-C power adapter with a fixed 19V negotiation cable.
But it is not low-end for sure. I'm kind of wasting the computer on this use case. It's just what I had after Pi 1B turned out not being enough.
3-4W mini PCs with lower peak power consumption are decently common these days - and with no need for compromises RPi requires.
Hi Jeff, I feel that for just a few watts idle extra you get a much more capable, and much more complete, easy-to-handle computer, at this time the Raspberry Pi starts to feel like, why do we still even care? let the industry customers have them.
I’m sure you have many more topics and a ton of other gear to explore to explore and many pi-related videos are fun entertainment (which is fine for it’s own sake) but it always practical.
That 4-SSD nas looks fragile as hell and I think it’s definitely worth exploring alternatives.
I wrote about it here: https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...
For PC-like applications I would tend to agree. A quick look at prices here in the UK:
* Rpi5 16GB - £114.90 (Pi Hut)
* Mini PC N150, 16GB (upgradable), 512GB M.2 SSD (upgradable), Win 11 Pro - £169.95 (Amazon)
On US Amazon, the GMKtec G3 Plus is an even better deal, right now it's $140, though that's with 8GB of RAM instead of 16 (16 GB model is $210). There's even a $10 coupon bringing it down to $130/$200 currently.
The mini PC also comes with a PSU (I assume).
But I think paying 50% more for the option of upgrading a low-power machine is daft. Or paying 50% more for an OS I don't want.
An oldish laptop would be better. Might get 4 in this price :S