I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.
The cheapest rpi that isn’t a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.
The pi 5 won’t ever be $35 because that’s not the price point it was designed to hit. That’s why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold. Same for the pi3.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint. You want a $35 computer, that’s how much you get. The original pi was $35 and had 256mb of ram.
-edit also, $35 in 2012 is $47 today with inflation. The pi 4 is a crazy good deal and readily available. This complaint just has no merit.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold.
Its a 5-year old product. With 5 year old specs.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint.
Yes I also didn’t specify a clock speed, storage size, network speed, etc. What I meant was a modern version of an old product with similarly modern specs.
$35 in 2012 is $47 today
And yet the Pi5 starts at $60.
You’re also missing the other half of this conversation where other SBCs have come way down in price.
Le Potato, Orange Pi, Zima products, Rockchip, not to mention all the X86 mini PCs, old office PCs, etc.
I think pi is on the road to mainstream. Probably time to shift to an open source hardware competitor to boost it. Not saying pi is bad, I have one and its great. Those like me who love tinkering should consider going the extra mile and „radicalize“ themselves to open hardware. The project I hear the most of is Banana-PI. www.banana-pi.org
Most alternatives use Rockchips such as Rk3566 or 3588 which are better in every way to the Pi chips of their respective price points. As long as they don’t use the Allwinner chips it’s usually decent out of the box but still a bit lacking.
I like Orange Pi more. They have pretty good out of the box documentation and a good range of hardware.
Radxa is also an option but they seem to offer the same stuff as Orange Pi but more expensive.
I used a lepotato on my last project in place of a pi3 but libre computer totally has rockchip boards available as well. Price wise seemed decent, documentation was decent enough for me and more importantly I could actually get one.
I thought I would love a power button but after installing my pi4 in a case with one, I found myself setting the jumper to “always on” after every small power outage took my server offline and I had to drag my lazy butt to my pi to turn it back on.
Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.
And now that they’re finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they’ve jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.
Don’t forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they’re the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.
That’s just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi’s for surveillance…
I’ve been feeling this as well. I’m not too into the Pis but I have one on my shelf for a “one day” project. Looking at the pi5 it’s way too expensive I feel like it’s lost its true niche and sold out being “too mainstream”
I need to look further into single chip computer things cause I’ve seen some competitors come out on my feeds. Hoping there’s an affordable alternative to the Pi5 that beings back the Pi3 feeling.
I’ve bought, owned, and used, Pi’s since the original. The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first version that I will not purchase and deploy, so fuck off with your bullshit and go back to shilling for YouTube advertisers, or whatever other corporate interest tickles your fancy, just take it somewhere else.
Tbh I can understand why they dedicated all of their stock to industrial customers instead of individuals. If back then they’d put all of their stock on the open market, it would’ve been scalped instantly. But what’s even more important is that there are businesses who’s products rely on the Pi being available, and tbh I’d rather have businesses using a Pi for their products instead of having to switch to a proprietary solution that nobody can service in 5 years.
Also: if you ever really needed a pi, you could’ve asked them via e-mail and they’d hook you up with one or a couple
The issue was they didn’t direct the stock to the industry. They directed the stock to large customers and the small companies had no inventory at all for years or were squeezed (by the market) to the limit with a Pi4 going for $200 and more instead of $50.
The Pi CEO already went out in an interview and was like we did the right thing and would do it again. As such it was pathetic (to me) when they launched the Pi5 and were like community first. To be honest, they probably know that they need initial community support/software packages to sell it to their primary customer: Big companies.
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