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.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?
And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?
Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.
Look, I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi,.since it’s just one of many tools we have at our disposal to get stuff done the way we want it and I don’t get why there has to be an objective best all around solution. If the Pi is what you are looking for: buy that, it’s nice that it has the things it has, it’s relatively low power and it’s tiny. If you are looking for more, buy more.
Of course there is faster stuff that’s older. For my setup, I want tiny and I want fast enough to host low-performance stuff like Home assistant, Baby buddy, an art stack, you get the jist. For this purpose a Pi that.goes into a literal drawer was exactly the thing I was looking for. It’s basically used to replace the VPS I have for security sensitive stuff (Vaultwarden). So “marginally more power” is still wasted power for me. It sits in a tiny cabinet next to my router now, happily serving me the wheel of time audiobooks and telling me when my.kid has.last eaten.
I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi
It’s because they’ve become way too expensive for what they are. They made perfect sense and filled a gap when they were priced half of what they are now. They’ve completely lost the direction or purpose they once had, or intentionally changed it to be something else entirely. And it seems that just doesn’t align well with many people.
Thing is, the RPi 5 8gb costs 94€ after tax, so 75.in Us-before-tax-pricing. At least where I live, that’s not a bad price for the package. Bedsides, the gap they filled is still addressed by the Zero 2W which is dead cheap for it’s capabilities.
For almost 100€ I can just get much more capable hardware with only marginally larger footprint (both physical and power). Unless I needed the pin IO, the pi is a bad deal. And then if youre just beginning you also need a case, SD card and power supply and suddenly that pi is almost 150€ (and still running a shitty 16gb SD card), making it a horrible deal. I got my NUC, 16gb of ram and 1tb NVME for the same price (before upgrades with the default 8gb ram and 120gb nvme it was 65€), if you’re planning on a miniature light weight home server setup, its just a no-brainer to not pick the pi.
And the zero doesn’t have the ability to use any peripherals except for a display.
I bought a NUC with quad core intel atom 12th gen, 16gb of ram, and 512 NVME for about the same price. mine came with a power supply, case, cooling, and has regular ports so I don’t need a fucking micro hdmi adapter.
You quotemined half of my sentence and acted smug. Nice. The second (conventiently left out) part explained why I don’t get that there needs to be active opposition at all. Yet, that didn’t quite look dumb enough to drop a ride one liner, did it?
I didn’t “quotemine” anything. I quoted the relevant portion of your statement that I replied to. The rest of your statement is still there for anyone to read.
Yeah, I have to use some weird adapter cable to get some cards to somehow maybe work a bit, but still probably need some external power supply, because there’s no way an RPi can deliver 75W.
Yes, it’s doable, but in the sense that I could build a house with just a saw and a forest.
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.
That’s about 4x the price for pihole. Pihole runsnon a zero 2w with headroom to spare. So it’s 16€+SD card+power supply you got lying around. What you described is a pretty convoluted setup for that. I had pihole+ Octoprint running on a 2W before. Worked flawlessly in my setup.
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.
If you click through to crowd supply it’s only $8, which is less ridiculous.
But you lose the ability to have them toss a cable or two into the box at no real extra shipping cost to them, and I highly doubt their costs aren’t lower through their website.
Wasn’t actually pulling the trigger today either way, but it’s an odd setup.
That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.
There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.
I wouldn’t expect that kind of price anymore except for the Zero models.
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.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?
And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?
Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.
Look, I don’t know why there is so much Opposition to the pi,.since it’s just one of many tools we have at our disposal to get stuff done the way we want it and I don’t get why there has to be an objective best all around solution. If the Pi is what you are looking for: buy that, it’s nice that it has the things it has, it’s relatively low power and it’s tiny. If you are looking for more, buy more.
Of course there is faster stuff that’s older. For my setup, I want tiny and I want fast enough to host low-performance stuff like Home assistant, Baby buddy, an art stack, you get the jist. For this purpose a Pi that.goes into a literal drawer was exactly the thing I was looking for. It’s basically used to replace the VPS I have for security sensitive stuff (Vaultwarden). So “marginally more power” is still wasted power for me. It sits in a tiny cabinet next to my router now, happily serving me the wheel of time audiobooks and telling me when my.kid has.last eaten.
It’s because they’ve become way too expensive for what they are. They made perfect sense and filled a gap when they were priced half of what they are now. They’ve completely lost the direction or purpose they once had, or intentionally changed it to be something else entirely. And it seems that just doesn’t align well with many people.
Thing is, the RPi 5 8gb costs 94€ after tax, so 75.in Us-before-tax-pricing. At least where I live, that’s not a bad price for the package. Bedsides, the gap they filled is still addressed by the Zero 2W which is dead cheap for it’s capabilities.
For almost 100€ I can just get much more capable hardware with only marginally larger footprint (both physical and power). Unless I needed the pin IO, the pi is a bad deal. And then if youre just beginning you also need a case, SD card and power supply and suddenly that pi is almost 150€ (and still running a shitty 16gb SD card), making it a horrible deal. I got my NUC, 16gb of ram and 1tb NVME for the same price (before upgrades with the default 8gb ram and 120gb nvme it was 65€), if you’re planning on a miniature light weight home server setup, its just a no-brainer to not pick the pi.
And the zero doesn’t have the ability to use any peripherals except for a display.
I bought a NUC with quad core intel atom 12th gen, 16gb of ram, and 512 NVME for about the same price. mine came with a power supply, case, cooling, and has regular ports so I don’t need a fucking micro hdmi adapter.
It’s been explained to you several times now.
It’s not that it’s a bad choice, it’s just that there are better choices available now, and lots of them.
You quotemined half of my sentence and acted smug. Nice. The second (conventiently left out) part explained why I don’t get that there needs to be active opposition at all. Yet, that didn’t quite look dumb enough to drop a ride one liner, did it?
I didn’t “quotemine” anything. I quoted the relevant portion of your statement that I replied to. The rest of your statement is still there for anyone to read.
Yeah, I have to use some weird adapter cable to get some cards to somehow maybe work a bit, but still probably need some external power supply, because there’s no way an RPi can deliver 75W.
Yes, it’s doable, but in the sense that I could build a house with just a saw and a forest.
PCIe is mainly for SSDs, you don’t need those things with that.
Single lane PCIe
Enough for Storage usually
I’d rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.
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.
That’s about 4x the price for pihole. Pihole runsnon a zero 2w with headroom to spare. So it’s 16€+SD card+power supply you got lying around. What you described is a pretty convoluted setup for that. I had pihole+ Octoprint running on a 2W before. Worked flawlessly in my setup.
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.
Damn. Looked decent until I got to $30 on shipping.
They’ll probably be available on Amazon eventually
If you click through to crowd supply it’s only $8, which is less ridiculous.
But you lose the ability to have them toss a cable or two into the box at no real extra shipping cost to them, and I highly doubt their costs aren’t lower through their website.
Wasn’t actually pulling the trigger today either way, but it’s an odd setup.
Oh cool! I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.
That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.
There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.
The pi 4 is literally $35 right now. The original pi, adjusted for inflation, was $47.