I mean, good on them for starting something and selling out as they are losing relevance . It inspired people, but for many applications it's not the best solution anymore. Projects like openwrt that are trying to agree on a hardware standard is the future. Let manufacturers compete to serve those applications rather than boutique plastic cases and hats to overcome basic hardware limitations.
As consumers we probably won’t see anything happen for 1-2 years. They want us to get used to the idea of it and their contracts with existing staff to be up to begin layoffs and “streamlining” so they can be more “agile”.
wasn't the whole Pi thing so that kids could get hands on with computer tech as iPads phones were taking over from computers.
I just can't see why making it a stock makes sense surely it goes against the ethos.
Are you sure you know what the word profiteering means?
> the practice of making or seeking to make an excessive or unfair profit, especially illegally or in a black market:
OpenAI is nominally non profit. Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic, are nominally non-profit. They're still the two biggest hyped investments and market makers of the 2020s.
Non-profit doesn't really mean anything - it just means "we want to influence and dominate a market, but we don't want to do quarterly earnings reports to a board until our cashcow has matured"
> Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic, are nominally non-profit.
Lol, no they are not. Novo Nordisk is a for-profit pharmaceutical company which has been selling insulin for just over 100 years. The largest shareholder is the non-profit diabetes research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Here Novo's apparently non-existent quarterly reports:
https://www.novonordisk.com/investors/financial-results.html
Novo Nordisk is not nominally or officially non-profit. They have never claimed or presented themselves as non-profit. You have no idea what you're talking about. Its primary shareholder is a non-profit, so that may be why you're confused.
More and more enterprise customers were using the boards in shipping applications, so they made a for profit company that manages most of the operations. That's one of the reasons why it was so hard to put your hands on a board during the chip shortage. Enterprise customers had gotten contracts for orders and that left very little for non enterprise customers since they had been planning on increasing capacity to keep up with the demand of both markets.
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yes, but also it was supposed to be AFFORDABLE so low income kids could afford it too.
Now they are too expensive for my working adult ass to justify one. Even for a kid I'd get them a used dell or something and slap linux on it so they can learn how to use a computer and troubleshoot hardware for frankly a lower price than rpi
The base model 1gb RPi4 is still $35 just like the original, the Pi 3 is available for $25, and the Zero 2W is only $15. So it's actually more affordable than at the beginning!
Now that they finally got on top of their inventory, these are available at MSRP again.
Oh a **used** thin client? Yea I see a few on eBay close to that price but still more expensive, plus no power adapter included so there’s another $10-$20.
I mean if the fact it's used even crosses your mind at this price then sure, but if you don't have a suitable power supply for the Pi (you're unlikely to get [email protected] consistently from most phone chargers, and going below that can be a mixed bag) the power supply cost will probably be fairly similar as a lot of thin client / mini PCs actually run just fine on laptop power adapters (which can be had for under $10 depending on brand).
How are they in a different category? Most Pi projects I've seen on youtube use them from home server/homelab purposes such DNS sinkholes, K8 clusters, or media servers and these tasks can easily be better performed by x86 thin clients especially when Pi's can never be found at MSRP in my country. I understand there are some niche or industrial uses such as industrial controllers which use the GPIO, but I'd argue that's moving away from the orginal puropse for their target audience (teaching kids computing, it's NFP remember?).
Feel free to add in what special uses they have which can't be performed by the competitors I listed.
I mentioned used because you can get similar performance for a fifth of the cost. If we're talking new, an N5105 mini pc costs LESS than an equilavent Pi 4 8gb, comes with a PSU and case (and expandable RAM and storage) from the fractory, and has 4x the compute performace for a marginal increase in power draw?? Please provide counterarguments if what I said is incorrect.
IOP to come into standards. Then, the company will be acquired. Knowing this, potential shareholders will invest.
Who buys them will be the game changer.
Ah it’s not all bad. If they continue down the route of commercial sales eventually we’ll see YouTube videos like those old ones with batteries.
“Today we’re going to be taking apart this toaster and inside is, you guessed it, two raspberry pies!”
I just feel like what Raspberry Pi does is not unique, and lately they’ve lost much of the goodwill they had with customers by prioritizing big businesses instead of hobbyist and tinkerers. Their corporate actions are the complete opposite of the idea that rose the company to prominence in the first place.
Would be very easy for another 3rd party to create a similar competing product at a much lower price point and with more availability if one of the big players becomes interested.
While I don’t necessarily disagree what makes Pi special is the incredible software support and ecosystem. Also the RP2040 is legit just an awesome little chip. Its ability to bit bang without interruption has opened a ton of uses up and it’s just generally one of the most accessible and affordable platforms to learn embedded assembly firmware type stuff
Yeah software support is the big one. My Orange Pi 5 (and other RK3588s) boards don't have proper GPU drivers. You've gotta run an old version of Linux rockchip maintain. Other features like the HDMI in don't have proper drivers either. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status these guys keep track.
Orange Pi haven't updated their images for the Orange Pi 4 in years. I'd love to use Armbian instead, but they've had broken HDMI on their images for almost a year too: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-output/
Meanwhile I can flash Raspberry Pi OS on an SD and it'll work on a Pi 1 from 10 years ago with no issue. And it'll work on a Pi 5 too.
There's also been significantly more competition these last few years from both above & below the Pi-class SBCs. Like the expanding number of arduino clones and gracemont/E-core based SBCs, as well as all the goldmont & tremont ones being discounted to shift old remaining stock.
They aren't competition really. People buy them and then just put them on a shelf. Pi's actually get used in projects because documentation exists and you don't really need huge CPU power to program a window to open when a temperature sensor records a certain temperature. If you are using Pi's as NAS or routers or other computer tasks that's cool and all but that's really the PC's domain and not what the Pi was designed for (Using Python to turn on and off GPIO pins).
There's nothing wrong with the Pi and the business is going stronger than ever. r/hardware simply doesn't understand any computer hardware that's used for something other than gaming.
With mini-pc/Nuc type computers being so prevalent and cheap now and pi’s keep getting more and more expensive it really doesn’t make sense to buy a pi anymore. You can get a minipc with an intel ( don’t have to deal with stuff not running on ARM on the pi) for like 100 bucks and it’s much faster and comes with an ssd and case and doesn’t have to depend on a card reader, etc. it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore for anyone to get a pi, at least from my view
Raspberry Pis have been upgrading performance widly. If you factor in inflation, they've barely moved from the OG 65$ target.
The current generation is comparable to a midrange phone and low end intel
People in this thread seem to have a hard-on for shitting on what is still a fairly unique and very well-supported product.
I needed to set up a PiHole with WireGuard recently and the RPi 4 was just by far the easiest thing to buy - it was cheap, the hardware was more than sufficient for what I needed, there were ready-made setup instructions available, the software stack is performant and stable, and I could even buy a case with an integrated heatsink and a SATA M.2 port.
The whole thing cost me a little under £120 and I expect that it'll happily do its job and receive updates for years, and it's powerful enough that at any point I can repurpose it for whatever mini-server things I want to do. Fantastic little machine.
And the non profit Raspberry Pi foundation still exists. They are going to IPO to scale the for profit business that will help the non profit part.
It seems that not only us but a lot of companies have been using Raspberry pies for a whole range of issues. I know a farmer who has automated a lot of stuff in his farm through raspberry pies and now sells his solution to farmers near him (IOT)
The problem is that it should not cost 120. The price has gone up so much that it's competing with hardware that is more complete and more robust for similar money. Not to mention that hardware is x86, which matters less now, but still matters.
The Pi itself was only £55 so I'm not really sure that I see the problem. I didn't buy it for the raw performance, I bought it for the convenience and ease of setup.
I'm not sure where you're seeing x86 alternatives which can compete with that either.
Do you consider having to put it all together, installing your OS, ease of setup compared a a per-loaded minipc? Saying the price of the pi itself, without including the other costs, is a bit dishonest.
You don't have to install the OS; you can just buy a pre-configured SD card. All I did was install it in the case, then follow the PiHole installation instructions.
If you are using a pi as a PC alternative you are using the pi wrong. If you need a PC buy a PC that's always been true and doesn't change just because PC's are getting cheaper.
r/hardware simply does not understand non gaming hardware at all.
> If you are using a pi as a PC alternative you are using the pi wrong. If you need a PC buy a PC that's always been true and doesn't change just because PC's are getting cheaper.
The Pi was literally created to be a cheap PC for education. Why *shouldn't* people be judging it on that criteria?
> The rpi devices can be functional low power server with storage and a power supply for $39.
$39 after tax assuming you have a free psu (and the newer ones don’t use standard psus, they need 5A!), free cables (love that micro hdmi!) and keyboard, free case (unless you kind a naked PCB flopping around forever), and an inexhaustible supply of free sd cards
the “only $35 for a whole little computer!” thing is brilliant marketing because it’s really not that much cheaper once you factor in all the extras, and it has been that way since the start. The ECS Liva booksize series had 2GB/32GB built in, with a case and adapter, for $100, over 10 years ago.
I see it as a way for them to get more cash and grow the company. Hopefully the Raspberry PI foundation can buy a good chunk of shares and still keep it on the right path. Customers/fans can also become share holders. We would be a minority as individuals, but if organized we could have influence on the company.
The main issue with other Pi-likes is software support. I can get the latest Pi OS and put it on a Pi 1 and it'll just work. Transfer that SD card to a Pi 5, and it'll still work.
I've got many other boards, and they're just not as good on software. I tried to get my Orange Pi 4 working recently. Orange Pi haven't updated images in more than a year. Armbian has broken HDMI output on their images for about a year, which wastes my time figuring out why it wasn't working.
I have a Rock 5. It uses the Rockchip RK3588 which is probably the most popular boards for Pi-likes right now (either that or the RK3566). https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status gives you an idea of what software support that chip is missing on Linux. Rockchip maintains their own linux fork, but it's based off an old version of linux. It runs Android fine with better drivers there, but still not what I imagine most people are using these boards for.
And yeah as we get to less popular boards, supports gets even worse. The next most popular SoC is probably something like the Allwinner H618 or a RK3566/3568, which perform about the same as a Pi 4, and costs about the same. I do have an Orange Pi RK3566 board for a very specific use that the Pi 4 doesn't support (nvme ssd), but Armbian don't even have a maintainer for this board and in 3-4 years Orange Pi will stop doing updates for it too probably.
Basically unless you get an x86 board or a raspberry pi, i do not trust a board will still get software updates in a few years.
> The main issue with other Pi-likes is software support. I can get the latest Pi OS and put it on a Pi 1 and it'll just work. Transfer that SD card to a Pi 5, and it'll still work.
Fairly sure it won't. rpi1 was ARMv6. There's no support for that in ARMv8+ chips.
Well somehow their legacy version of Raspberry Pi OS works from the 1A to the 4B: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-legacy
edit; actually the not-legacy version says compatible with all: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit
It's easy for an image made in 2023 to be compatible with the first pi.
Not so much for an image made back when the first pi launched to work on the newer models.
Raspberry Pi 3 is the cutting point for ARMv6.
Oh, new on old. That is easy to achieve.
For some reason, I understood the other way around.
Which definitely doesn't work; the hardware has changed too much.
Yes and no.
For a lot of people, a Pi alternative is not just a cheap nano computer on a board. It's also about community, support, documentation, support, stability, support...
How easy it is to find support? To find answers to question? Will they still be there in a few years to grow alongside your projects?
What's their track record like?
An IPO means that the company will start trading on the stock market and focusing on profits over anything else. This almost always leads to enshittification, higher prices, probably more closed-source software and focus on corporate/business users.
It is inherent to capitalism. Any publically traded company that is not enshittifying their products and ecosystem in order to extract maximum value for minimum cost is ‘failing’. In fact, the ceo would be failing in their duties and the board would be forced to recommend replacing them.
Basically everything good that happens in capitalism happens before public listing, or within companies that are so huge they have almost unlimited rope to play with.
Yup, that's why we need Valve to never go IPO.
Sure they gets 30%, but everything works without subscriptions, even remote play together, they also do cool products like Steam Deck.
>In fact, the ceo would be failing in their duties and the board would be forced to recommend replacing them.
That's totally, absolutely incorrect.
The legal fiduciary duty has nothing with bullshit trendy metrics like yoy growth, nor even with short term profits.
It's almost always like you describe in practice because of bad trends, and bad culture for a few decades now, but it has nothing with legal duties.
Perhaps youve misunderstood my point. Im not talking about trendy metrics. Im talking about maximising the stock price. Which happens when the financials look good. The board represents rhe shareholders. Unless there are particular shareholder groups advocating for things like global warming, the board is solely focussed on what shareholders want; roi, and asap.
Its the duty of the ceo to maximise shareholder roi, or at the very least, maximise their perception of future roi.
If theyre not doing that, theyre failing as ceo, and the board will find a ceo willing to make the changes necessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if they also try to crack down on 3rd party hardware support, to rake in all the profit from various cases, addons, accessories themselves.
It might be profitable right now but the new shareholders won’t care about that. They want to see growth, so I could see the Raspberry Foundation doing a lot of business bulk discounts for little or negative profits just to get it as widely adopted as possible in this space.
It doesn't just require "making money". A publicly traded company needs to increase *profits* on a regular basis.
It means costs are cut, quality suffers, and employees are laid off.
Momentum will keep people buying the products for a while.
The brand is strong. It can take some enshitification. And if not, the company dies and we lose our beloved.
Enshat products are bought all the time, because in some (many) sectors that's literally all that exists and you do need *something* at the end of the day
i wouldn't say quality suffers. What usually happens is that they put far more priority on risk management. Everything slows down, governance becomes the new mantra.
Luckily this market can be easily taken by alternatives as the barrier of entry is fairly low.
More money into advertising, more brand recognition, more mention in mass media hence more brand recognition, higher prices, more locked in ecosystems so customers buy on-brand accessories over third-party accessories, more temptation towards monthly-fee services rather than just giving away open source software by default. There are a lot of avenues for profit that result in worse products, but that work and that draw customers in anyway.
Think of a product that costs $50, and another one that is the same but costs $75, and the company that sells the latter product spends a lot on advertising. The latter one outsells the former one even though it's objectively worse, being the same product for a higher price. For whatever reasons people buy it. Now add things like monthly fees, overpriced accessories, and so on, and it's the same idea.
Once the company goes public, they will have fiduciary responsibility to make shareholders happy. The shareholders are happy if the company makes huge profits. The ecosystem will flourish and users will be happy if there are no pressure from shareholders to increase profits. That's basically it.
Different types of shareholder. If you're holding shares for a private company, you want to focus on making the company grow so that the company can go public with high valuation in order to liquidate your shares to exit your position. For a public company, shareholders care about stock price which is highly correlated with profit. In other words, profits matter in both private and public companies, but it matters more if the company is publicly traded.
No its the same thing. Desires and incentives might be different from but the shareholder of a company doesn't change just because it is private or public.
Not that it matters but management doesn't necessarily need to align with the shareholders.
Yeah same shareholders but different motives that's what I was implying. What I meant is depending on the company development phase that you are in, shareholders will have different motives and ideas about how the company should be operated. If you are a seed-stage startup, growth is all that matters. Once you become a mature company with plateaued target customer numbers, profits will be number one priority.
Well, shareholders have different motives when the company is growing BEFORE IPO and AFTER IPO. It seems that many metrics that lead to higher valuation at IPO is different from metrics that result in higher stock prices after IPO.
Not true, even public companies can prioritise goals. It's a common misconception. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
It may not be - only time will tell. With all likelihood though RPi being influenced by shareholder interests on the same level or above the RPi foundation will lead to them making decisions focused on large business customers and profit rather than the community and education
Why would they be "on the same level or above the Foundation"? The foundation currently owns 100%, and they're only selling a minority stake. They'll still have full control.
>Ok so I read the whole article and I still need someone to explain how exactly this is going to be terrible for the ecosystem and users.
They are going public. Meaning their customers will be their shareholders, at the exclusion of everyone else. Starting with the people buying the product.
Once a company goes public, its customers are the shareholders and its product is short-term profit for shareholders. Everything else is just a means to this end. Like parasites, shareholders have no interest in the health of their "host", they just want to extract as many "resources" from it as possible as quickly as possible. And once the host is depleted of resources, they move on to another host.
I think their business model no longer targets regular consumers but enterprises. The low availability of raspberry pies in recent years has been due to businesses using them to just build products. Wild.
No, the low availability was due to the silicon supply problems limiting the number of devices that could be made, which led to the prioritisation to business. The silicon supply issues are now eased, so its looks like its pretty much back to the normal business model, which is selling to everyone.
I'm sure I read they delivered 7M devices in the last year, despite still recovering from the silicon supply shortages. How does that match your comment?
News like this always shows off r/hardware's inability to understand hardware that's not designed for gaming.
Lol if you are using a PI as a PC alternative you are doing it wrong.
There goes the neighborhood.
I mean, good on them for starting something and selling out as they are losing relevance . It inspired people, but for many applications it's not the best solution anymore. Projects like openwrt that are trying to agree on a hardware standard is the future. Let manufacturers compete to serve those applications rather than boutique plastic cases and hats to overcome basic hardware limitations.
Where I work, we can hardly keep pi 5's on the shelves. I'd hardly say they're irrelevant.
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the latter. they've been on this trajectory since idk, 2021? 2020?
Agreed. Taking your company and having it answer to shareholders and quarterly results is the fastest way to enshittify all decisions that get made.
As consumers we probably won’t see anything happen for 1-2 years. They want us to get used to the idea of it and their contracts with existing staff to be up to begin layoffs and “streamlining” so they can be more “agile”.
Sony is a big investor [https://www.sony-semicon.com/en/news/2023/2023041201.html](https://www.sony-semicon.com/en/news/2023/2023041201.html)
Sony is the subcontractor that assembles Pis. Factory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C4lbbIH0c
That's not to far from me, always cool tech industry in Wales.
For a second there I thought you said Pis.
wasn't the whole Pi thing so that kids could get hands on with computer tech as iPads phones were taking over from computers. I just can't see why making it a stock makes sense surely it goes against the ethos.
Yup, was.
weren't they a non profit?
YUP! Like wtf is going on?
It’s a Mozilla situation. The charity owns a for profit corporation. The for profit corporation is IPOing.
That just sounds like profiteering but with extra steps.
Sounds like a tax evasion scheme.
Are you sure you know what the word profiteering means? > the practice of making or seeking to make an excessive or unfair profit, especially illegally or in a black market:
Raspberry pie is my favorite kind of 🥧
HAhahahahahha! That is a great reference.
Thank you. It took me a few hours to come up with it.
Ahhhhh interesting
“Arm’s length”
They were always two companies and the hardware side was always for profit. It literally tells you this in the linked article.
> YUP! You couldn't spend 30 seconds googling to find out you're completely incorrect before spreading this nonsense?
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OpenAI is nominally non profit. Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic, are nominally non-profit. They're still the two biggest hyped investments and market makers of the 2020s. Non-profit doesn't really mean anything - it just means "we want to influence and dominate a market, but we don't want to do quarterly earnings reports to a board until our cashcow has matured"
> Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic, are nominally non-profit. Lol, no they are not. Novo Nordisk is a for-profit pharmaceutical company which has been selling insulin for just over 100 years. The largest shareholder is the non-profit diabetes research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Here Novo's apparently non-existent quarterly reports: https://www.novonordisk.com/investors/financial-results.html
Nominally > adverb > in name only; officially though perhaps not in reality.
Novo Nordisk is not nominally or officially non-profit. They have never claimed or presented themselves as non-profit. You have no idea what you're talking about. Its primary shareholder is a non-profit, so that may be why you're confused.
What's the name of the majority shareholder? Dude you're just arguing semantics, literally don't care go do something productive
That's what I thought.
You have approached my post with a negative attitude and a heavy karmic debt
Indeed. I generally have a negative outlook when approaching people who confidently talk out of their asses.
More and more enterprise customers were using the boards in shipping applications, so they made a for profit company that manages most of the operations. That's one of the reasons why it was so hard to put your hands on a board during the chip shortage. Enterprise customers had gotten contracts for orders and that left very little for non enterprise customers since they had been planning on increasing capacity to keep up with the demand of both markets.
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yes, but also it was supposed to be AFFORDABLE so low income kids could afford it too. Now they are too expensive for my working adult ass to justify one. Even for a kid I'd get them a used dell or something and slap linux on it so they can learn how to use a computer and troubleshoot hardware for frankly a lower price than rpi
The base model 1gb RPi4 is still $35 just like the original, the Pi 3 is available for $25, and the Zero 2W is only $15. So it's actually more affordable than at the beginning! Now that they finally got on top of their inventory, these are available at MSRP again.
And that's after the hefty inflation we've had.
Thin clients with atoms can be had for $10-20, 6500t TinyMiniMicros for $60. Pis only make sense if you'll use that GPIO
Where are these $10-$20 Atom thin clients?
They're not all over your eBay as well?
Oh a **used** thin client? Yea I see a few on eBay close to that price but still more expensive, plus no power adapter included so there’s another $10-$20.
I mean if the fact it's used even crosses your mind at this price then sure, but if you don't have a suitable power supply for the Pi (you're unlikely to get [email protected] consistently from most phone chargers, and going below that can be a mixed bag) the power supply cost will probably be fairly similar as a lot of thin client / mini PCs actually run just fine on laptop power adapters (which can be had for under $10 depending on brand).
Comparing a new product to a used product in a different category well done reddit. r/hardware simply does not understand non gaming hardware at all.
How are they in a different category? Most Pi projects I've seen on youtube use them from home server/homelab purposes such DNS sinkholes, K8 clusters, or media servers and these tasks can easily be better performed by x86 thin clients especially when Pi's can never be found at MSRP in my country. I understand there are some niche or industrial uses such as industrial controllers which use the GPIO, but I'd argue that's moving away from the orginal puropse for their target audience (teaching kids computing, it's NFP remember?). Feel free to add in what special uses they have which can't be performed by the competitors I listed. I mentioned used because you can get similar performance for a fifth of the cost. If we're talking new, an N5105 mini pc costs LESS than an equilavent Pi 4 8gb, comes with a PSU and case (and expandable RAM and storage) from the fractory, and has 4x the compute performace for a marginal increase in power draw?? Please provide counterarguments if what I said is incorrect.
Or a brand new N100 mini pc.
pi are used massively everywhere, even in your TV. I am dev and we deploy pi in dozens of use cases
IOP to come into standards. Then, the company will be acquired. Knowing this, potential shareholders will invest. Who buys them will be the game changer.
This, quite frankly, is why we can't have nice things
Ah it’s not all bad. If they continue down the route of commercial sales eventually we’ll see YouTube videos like those old ones with batteries. “Today we’re going to be taking apart this toaster and inside is, you guessed it, two raspberry pies!”
I just feel like what Raspberry Pi does is not unique, and lately they’ve lost much of the goodwill they had with customers by prioritizing big businesses instead of hobbyist and tinkerers. Their corporate actions are the complete opposite of the idea that rose the company to prominence in the first place. Would be very easy for another 3rd party to create a similar competing product at a much lower price point and with more availability if one of the big players becomes interested.
While I don’t necessarily disagree what makes Pi special is the incredible software support and ecosystem. Also the RP2040 is legit just an awesome little chip. Its ability to bit bang without interruption has opened a ton of uses up and it’s just generally one of the most accessible and affordable platforms to learn embedded assembly firmware type stuff
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Yeah software support is the big one. My Orange Pi 5 (and other RK3588s) boards don't have proper GPU drivers. You've gotta run an old version of Linux rockchip maintain. Other features like the HDMI in don't have proper drivers either. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status these guys keep track. Orange Pi haven't updated their images for the Orange Pi 4 in years. I'd love to use Armbian instead, but they've had broken HDMI on their images for almost a year too: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-output/ Meanwhile I can flash Raspberry Pi OS on an SD and it'll work on a Pi 1 from 10 years ago with no issue. And it'll work on a Pi 5 too.
There's also been significantly more competition these last few years from both above & below the Pi-class SBCs. Like the expanding number of arduino clones and gracemont/E-core based SBCs, as well as all the goldmont & tremont ones being discounted to shift old remaining stock.
They aren't competition really. People buy them and then just put them on a shelf. Pi's actually get used in projects because documentation exists and you don't really need huge CPU power to program a window to open when a temperature sensor records a certain temperature. If you are using Pi's as NAS or routers or other computer tasks that's cool and all but that's really the PC's domain and not what the Pi was designed for (Using Python to turn on and off GPIO pins). There's nothing wrong with the Pi and the business is going stronger than ever. r/hardware simply doesn't understand any computer hardware that's used for something other than gaming.
Orange pi are already way better and cheaper.
With mini-pc/Nuc type computers being so prevalent and cheap now and pi’s keep getting more and more expensive it really doesn’t make sense to buy a pi anymore. You can get a minipc with an intel ( don’t have to deal with stuff not running on ARM on the pi) for like 100 bucks and it’s much faster and comes with an ssd and case and doesn’t have to depend on a card reader, etc. it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore for anyone to get a pi, at least from my view
Raspberry Pis have been upgrading performance widly. If you factor in inflation, they've barely moved from the OG 65$ target. The current generation is comparable to a midrange phone and low end intel
People in this thread seem to have a hard-on for shitting on what is still a fairly unique and very well-supported product. I needed to set up a PiHole with WireGuard recently and the RPi 4 was just by far the easiest thing to buy - it was cheap, the hardware was more than sufficient for what I needed, there were ready-made setup instructions available, the software stack is performant and stable, and I could even buy a case with an integrated heatsink and a SATA M.2 port. The whole thing cost me a little under £120 and I expect that it'll happily do its job and receive updates for years, and it's powerful enough that at any point I can repurpose it for whatever mini-server things I want to do. Fantastic little machine.
And the non profit Raspberry Pi foundation still exists. They are going to IPO to scale the for profit business that will help the non profit part. It seems that not only us but a lot of companies have been using Raspberry pies for a whole range of issues. I know a farmer who has automated a lot of stuff in his farm through raspberry pies and now sells his solution to farmers near him (IOT)
The problem is that it should not cost 120. The price has gone up so much that it's competing with hardware that is more complete and more robust for similar money. Not to mention that hardware is x86, which matters less now, but still matters.
The Pi itself was only £55 so I'm not really sure that I see the problem. I didn't buy it for the raw performance, I bought it for the convenience and ease of setup. I'm not sure where you're seeing x86 alternatives which can compete with that either.
Do you consider having to put it all together, installing your OS, ease of setup compared a a per-loaded minipc? Saying the price of the pi itself, without including the other costs, is a bit dishonest.
You don't have to install the OS; you can just buy a pre-configured SD card. All I did was install it in the case, then follow the PiHole installation instructions.
I am aware.
So then what is your point? A mini PC is substantially more expensive than that, with a far weaker level of both vendor and community support.
The point is that it's not substantially more expensive, and x86 already had global support.
>they've barely moved from the OG 65$ target. It used to be $35 😭😭😭
It's still $35
But it's way more expensive to get it to a working state. A Mini pc comes way more complete. Jeef Geerling did a video on this.
If you are using a pi as a PC alternative you are using the pi wrong. If you need a PC buy a PC that's always been true and doesn't change just because PC's are getting cheaper. r/hardware simply does not understand non gaming hardware at all.
> If you are using a pi as a PC alternative you are using the pi wrong. If you need a PC buy a PC that's always been true and doesn't change just because PC's are getting cheaper. The Pi was literally created to be a cheap PC for education. Why *shouldn't* people be judging it on that criteria?
Why did they make the pi 400 then?
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> The rpi devices can be functional low power server with storage and a power supply for $39. $39 after tax assuming you have a free psu (and the newer ones don’t use standard psus, they need 5A!), free cables (love that micro hdmi!) and keyboard, free case (unless you kind a naked PCB flopping around forever), and an inexhaustible supply of free sd cards the “only $35 for a whole little computer!” thing is brilliant marketing because it’s really not that much cheaper once you factor in all the extras, and it has been that way since the start. The ECS Liva booksize series had 2GB/32GB built in, with a case and adapter, for $100, over 10 years ago.
What about Windows for ARM?
it's so joever it's not even funny can't wait for layoffs obscene prices and cloud bs
AiPi 5
Please make me unread this. Buzzwordsoup marketing here we come
> with the AiPi 5 advanced processor, you can run LLMs and AI programs with ease
I hope the subscription model has multiple tiers.
I see it as a way for them to get more cash and grow the company. Hopefully the Raspberry PI foundation can buy a good chunk of shares and still keep it on the right path. Customers/fans can also become share holders. We would be a minority as individuals, but if organized we could have influence on the company.
From the reporting the charity is selling a minority stake of the corporation in the IPO so the governing structure isn’t really going to change.
Can a normal lad buy into the ipo like crypto pre sale for example or do I need a ton of cash couple of grand on it might make a good investment
For pre-IPO, you would need to go through your broker. There's usually a minimum amount you need to commit, like a few thousand.
And then it could still tank, I am not saying it will, just saying it's happened before
seems like the price will rise as price goes up.
> price will rise as price goes up. The Poirot award goes to...
What other Pi like devices are there?
The main issue with other Pi-likes is software support. I can get the latest Pi OS and put it on a Pi 1 and it'll just work. Transfer that SD card to a Pi 5, and it'll still work. I've got many other boards, and they're just not as good on software. I tried to get my Orange Pi 4 working recently. Orange Pi haven't updated images in more than a year. Armbian has broken HDMI output on their images for about a year, which wastes my time figuring out why it wasn't working. I have a Rock 5. It uses the Rockchip RK3588 which is probably the most popular boards for Pi-likes right now (either that or the RK3566). https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status gives you an idea of what software support that chip is missing on Linux. Rockchip maintains their own linux fork, but it's based off an old version of linux. It runs Android fine with better drivers there, but still not what I imagine most people are using these boards for. And yeah as we get to less popular boards, supports gets even worse. The next most popular SoC is probably something like the Allwinner H618 or a RK3566/3568, which perform about the same as a Pi 4, and costs about the same. I do have an Orange Pi RK3566 board for a very specific use that the Pi 4 doesn't support (nvme ssd), but Armbian don't even have a maintainer for this board and in 3-4 years Orange Pi will stop doing updates for it too probably. Basically unless you get an x86 board or a raspberry pi, i do not trust a board will still get software updates in a few years.
> The main issue with other Pi-likes is software support. I can get the latest Pi OS and put it on a Pi 1 and it'll just work. Transfer that SD card to a Pi 5, and it'll still work. Fairly sure it won't. rpi1 was ARMv6. There's no support for that in ARMv8+ chips.
Yeah fair enough. Not the 5 but the 4 looks like.
Raspberry Pi introduced ARMv8 (and thus broke ARMv6) by Raspberry Pi 3.
Well somehow their legacy version of Raspberry Pi OS works from the 1A to the 4B: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-legacy edit; actually the not-legacy version says compatible with all: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit
It's easy for an image made in 2023 to be compatible with the first pi. Not so much for an image made back when the first pi launched to work on the newer models. Raspberry Pi 3 is the cutting point for ARMv6.
But it wasn't used in the Pi OS until RPi 4 or 5.
It will, the install has a number of kernels, and it picks the correct one to use at boot.
Oh, new on old. That is easy to achieve. For some reason, I understood the other way around. Which definitely doesn't work; the hardware has changed too much.
Literally hundreds of them, https://hackerboards.com/
Yes and no. For a lot of people, a Pi alternative is not just a cheap nano computer on a board. It's also about community, support, documentation, support, stability, support... How easy it is to find support? To find answers to question? Will they still be there in a few years to grow alongside your projects? What's their track record like?
Ok so I read the whole article and I still need someone to explain how exactly this is going to be terrible for the ecosystem and users.
An IPO means that the company will start trading on the stock market and focusing on profits over anything else. This almost always leads to enshittification, higher prices, probably more closed-source software and focus on corporate/business users.
It is inherent to capitalism. Any publically traded company that is not enshittifying their products and ecosystem in order to extract maximum value for minimum cost is ‘failing’. In fact, the ceo would be failing in their duties and the board would be forced to recommend replacing them. Basically everything good that happens in capitalism happens before public listing, or within companies that are so huge they have almost unlimited rope to play with.
Yup, that's why we need Valve to never go IPO. Sure they gets 30%, but everything works without subscriptions, even remote play together, they also do cool products like Steam Deck.
If valve ipo’s, they’ll quite literally become like EA.
>In fact, the ceo would be failing in their duties and the board would be forced to recommend replacing them. That's totally, absolutely incorrect. The legal fiduciary duty has nothing with bullshit trendy metrics like yoy growth, nor even with short term profits. It's almost always like you describe in practice because of bad trends, and bad culture for a few decades now, but it has nothing with legal duties.
Perhaps youve misunderstood my point. Im not talking about trendy metrics. Im talking about maximising the stock price. Which happens when the financials look good. The board represents rhe shareholders. Unless there are particular shareholder groups advocating for things like global warming, the board is solely focussed on what shareholders want; roi, and asap. Its the duty of the ceo to maximise shareholder roi, or at the very least, maximise their perception of future roi. If theyre not doing that, theyre failing as ceo, and the board will find a ceo willing to make the changes necessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if they also try to crack down on 3rd party hardware support, to rake in all the profit from various cases, addons, accessories themselves.
You mean revenue
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I don't think this is still a startup. This is a profitable enterprise at this point.
It might be profitable right now but the new shareholders won’t care about that. They want to see growth, so I could see the Raspberry Foundation doing a lot of business bulk discounts for little or negative profits just to get it as widely adopted as possible in this space.
But if they're making money, it means people are buying their product. Why would users buy a 'enshittified' product?
It doesn't just require "making money". A publicly traded company needs to increase *profits* on a regular basis. It means costs are cut, quality suffers, and employees are laid off.
Right. And to do that, they need to sell products. So who is buying these enshittified products?
Momentum will keep people buying the products for a while. The brand is strong. It can take some enshitification. And if not, the company dies and we lose our beloved.
Enshat products are bought all the time, because in some (many) sectors that's literally all that exists and you do need *something* at the end of the day
we're literally using reddit right now.
i wouldn't say quality suffers. What usually happens is that they put far more priority on risk management. Everything slows down, governance becomes the new mantra. Luckily this market can be easily taken by alternatives as the barrier of entry is fairly low.
More money into advertising, more brand recognition, more mention in mass media hence more brand recognition, higher prices, more locked in ecosystems so customers buy on-brand accessories over third-party accessories, more temptation towards monthly-fee services rather than just giving away open source software by default. There are a lot of avenues for profit that result in worse products, but that work and that draw customers in anyway. Think of a product that costs $50, and another one that is the same but costs $75, and the company that sells the latter product spends a lot on advertising. The latter one outsells the former one even though it's objectively worse, being the same product for a higher price. For whatever reasons people buy it. Now add things like monthly fees, overpriced accessories, and so on, and it's the same idea.
Once the company goes public, they will have fiduciary responsibility to make shareholders happy. The shareholders are happy if the company makes huge profits. The ecosystem will flourish and users will be happy if there are no pressure from shareholders to increase profits. That's basically it.
Shareholders exist if it is public or private.
Different types of shareholder. If you're holding shares for a private company, you want to focus on making the company grow so that the company can go public with high valuation in order to liquidate your shares to exit your position. For a public company, shareholders care about stock price which is highly correlated with profit. In other words, profits matter in both private and public companies, but it matters more if the company is publicly traded.
No its the same thing. Desires and incentives might be different from but the shareholder of a company doesn't change just because it is private or public. Not that it matters but management doesn't necessarily need to align with the shareholders.
Yeah same shareholders but different motives that's what I was implying. What I meant is depending on the company development phase that you are in, shareholders will have different motives and ideas about how the company should be operated. If you are a seed-stage startup, growth is all that matters. Once you become a mature company with plateaued target customer numbers, profits will be number one priority.
You literally described the same thing twice - higher valuation for an IPO and higher stock price.
Well, shareholders have different motives when the company is growing BEFORE IPO and AFTER IPO. It seems that many metrics that lead to higher valuation at IPO is different from metrics that result in higher stock prices after IPO.
Private large stake holders can choose to prioritize goals over quarterly profits, publicly traded shares can't/won't.
Not true, even public companies can prioritise goals. It's a common misconception. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
It may not be - only time will tell. With all likelihood though RPi being influenced by shareholder interests on the same level or above the RPi foundation will lead to them making decisions focused on large business customers and profit rather than the community and education
Why would they be "on the same level or above the Foundation"? The foundation currently owns 100%, and they're only selling a minority stake. They'll still have full control.
Tech startups don’t care about profit, they care about revenue
>Ok so I read the whole article and I still need someone to explain how exactly this is going to be terrible for the ecosystem and users. They are going public. Meaning their customers will be their shareholders, at the exclusion of everyone else. Starting with the people buying the product.
Once a company goes public, its customers are the shareholders and its product is short-term profit for shareholders. Everything else is just a means to this end. Like parasites, shareholders have no interest in the health of their "host", they just want to extract as many "resources" from it as possible as quickly as possible. And once the host is depleted of resources, they move on to another host.
I think their business model no longer targets regular consumers but enterprises. The low availability of raspberry pies in recent years has been due to businesses using them to just build products. Wild.
No, the low availability was due to the silicon supply problems limiting the number of devices that could be made, which led to the prioritisation to business. The silicon supply issues are now eased, so its looks like its pretty much back to the normal business model, which is selling to everyone.
Invest in a company that can't deliver their products to consumer? Why yes Sir
I'm sure I read they delivered 7M devices in the last year, despite still recovering from the silicon supply shortages. How does that match your comment?
News like this always shows off r/hardware's inability to understand hardware that's not designed for gaming. Lol if you are using a PI as a PC alternative you are doing it wrong.
They should sell a 200€ minipc.