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- Hacker News
- Forgot that time that Raspberry Pi hired a cop and everyone got pissed:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspb...
by kotaKat - When the raspberry pi became more expensive than a used thinkpad on ebay, they've lost what made them great.by 9999_points
- Yeah, they lost the narrative. Hard.
These days I can buy a old FB marketplace or Craigslist laptop and get EVERYTHING in 1. Maybe have to buy a new battery. Usually $100-150.
If I need IO for controlling sensors and things, there's clone Arduino nanos for $5 from CN or $10 from US. And if anything burns out, it's a simple replace.
I've been done with RPi for a while now.
by nekusar - Could also get ESP32 instead of Arduino. Just as cheap, way more powerful, and has WiFi+BT included. Even more reasons to not get a RPi.by Rohansi
- They are really good for edge devices. We have a Raspberrypi 5 running as a thermal imaging enabled wildlife camera with local AI. I don't think you can find another platform that can support this as well.by hcfman
- Jetson Orin Nano? Although I have no idea what those cost nowadays...by justin66
- Cool, I started using a RBPi4 at I had purchased 3 years ago and never used. I use it to be able to start my "AI-agent" PC remotely, to send wake-up-on-LAN signal from anywhere. I am also thinking now to add a tasks queue on PI itself, so I can send requests directly to the PI, it stores them, and maybe once or twice a day, it turns on the PC, sends all the tasks, then turns it off.by XCSme
- Broke off my Pi 4Bs USB C port when using it to test link speed for new LAN outlets, when I wanted to reorder I realized the 4 GB version is now 120 EUR… Damn.
- May be possible to repair the existing one?by nusl
- If you can get them. Seems to be the most popular choice.by hcfman
- For the people who are sad about the high prices of the Pi range, I want to mention that I'm having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2. It's obviously not quite the same thing (ie. not a regular desktop computer), but it's ridiculously capable for its few-dollars price point. There's a lot you can do with it.
If you just want a cheap computer the Pi's don't seem so great these days, but the Picos are where the fun is now.
by Joeboy - The zero 2 (W) seems pretty great if you just want a cheap linux device.by ahepp
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is the sweet spot these days for price/performance, but it's nowhere to by found in stock, sadly despite the fact it has LPDDR2 type of RAMby merpkz
- It would be a heck of a lot more useful if it had a basic (even 100Mbps) wired ethernet interface on it, then you could put it places without worrying about its horrid 802.11n-only 2.4 GHz only wifi with tiny antenna, be assured it had a reliable ethernet connection, and power it by a cheap 802.3af-to-MicroUSB 5V2A PoE splitter.
It's weird there's cheap and plentiful STM32 series things with physical ethernet ports (but they're very weak microcontrollers with little CPU or RAM) which do manage to have real ethernet ports on them...
by walrus01 - My PC runs Linux now because I bought the Raspberry Pi back in 2012, and I'm very grateful for that.by graycrow
- A lot of the vibecoded interactive experiences remind me of these interactive books i had as a kid where you would open different hidden parts to explore. At some point it gets boring, i do not want to click one million times to find the information I am looking for. So, it is not interactive, this is a chore.by kh_hk
- The Pi makes no sense anymore at these prices. But I love that I got to experience them when they were affordable. I owned multiple 4bs at one point, and even have a 2b and 3b lying around. I have a clusterhat that I tried to setup again, but realized that the Pi0Ws have only 512mb RAM each and that's useless now.
- with headless debian, i think you have around 400MB ram left for yourself, enough to run light stuff like pihole or Wireguardby mrheosuper
- I know RAM prices aren't under control of the raspberry pi project, but something has gone dreadfully wrong in the economy when individual 8GB+ raspberry pi are now costing $200 to $300 for just the board before you add USB-C power supply, heatsinks, case, etc.
If a person doesn't need GPIO pins or other direct access to hardware [1], I don't understand why people are trying to use them with 1080p and 4K displays, keyboards and mice as general desktop linux computers. You can get a far more capable small form factor or ultra small form factor used Intel Core i5/i7 something corporate desktop with 16GB of RAM and a real SSD for like 150 bucks on eBay (USD). It'll be significantly faster.
Install barebones debian amd64, 'sudo apt install xfce4-desktop', it'll pull in all the xorg and other dependencies and also install a GUI login screen.
20 seconds of searching turned up something that doesn't suck: https://www.ebay.com/itm/820084016851?_skw=dell+optiplex+16G...
The one raspberry pi model which is still close to the original's $35 price is the raspberry pi model 4 1GB which is $49 in Canada. Accounting for inflation and difference between USD:CAD, that's about the same as 35 bucks. I think there are still a ton of uses for raspberry pi 3B+ or model 4 1GB particularly because you can power them off an 802.3af power over ethernet switch and cable, to stick one in a weird place with power and ethernet in one cable, with a basic $15 PoE splitter to USB-C power on the load end. [2]
[1]: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/rpi-gpio-pins
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/UCTRONICS-PoE-Splitter-USB-C-Complian...
by walrus01 - It's more like for web people that wants to do embedded stuff and don't bother learning.
I've seen someone used the entire raspberry pi zero(dual core 1Ghz cpu with hundreds of MB ram) just to do some http request and display on a simple LCD, with python no less. All can be done with a simple esp32.
But hey, as long as it works, right ?
by mrheosuper - > If a person doesn't need GPIO pins or other direct access to hardware
One commonly used feature might be HDMI-CEC integration for media centers, but otherwise I agree with you.
by swed420 - 8GB is a bit overkill though, of course depending on what you use it for but it is an unfair baseline.
2 GB costs a fraction (but maybe get 4 if you want/need margin) and is more than enough for most projects. And I say this as someone whose opinion is that 32 GB is the absolute bare minimum for a general purpose computer (including laptops).
by tjoff - > You can get a far more capable small form factor or ultra small form factor used Intel Core i5/i7 something corporate desktop with 16GB of RAM and a real SSD for like 150 bucks on eBay (USD). It'll be significantly faster.
Highly agree with this option. But it's actually far worse than this because the total cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 is also higher than a brand new mini PC that comes with everything (including SSD). You can get an Intel N150 with 16GB RAM and an SSD for $250+ CAD while a Raspberry Pi 5 16GB with required accessories is $400 CAD. More if you want to use an SSD instead of an SD card.
by Rohansi - I’ve always said that. If you want basic GPIO you can always shove a smaller MCU on the end of a USB cable and talk to that. Most of the embedded stuff I’ve done in the last decade has worked like that.
They are also terrible in education. Unreliable, huge set up time, no education software runs on them properly.
On the unreliable thing I got booted off their forums for writing a technical evaluation of the RPi 1 brown out issues with USB. That really put a bad taste in my mouth. Refuse to use any of their products since.
by sdcfgy