Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February
There era of Pi shortages is quickly coming to an end.
The Pi foundation showed their true colors. Don't continue to support them.
What did they do, I'm out of the loop?
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..
The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.
But i have trouble investing further into them.
Are they still telling their users to suck it?
https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/
Pi 5 sucks massive balls.
They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn't work with any normal USB C psu.
This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn't included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.
Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)
The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.
I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.
Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff
Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it's so sad what's become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.
The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.
If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.
Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.
The integrated GPU is pretty good though.
Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.
There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.
What non standard thing are they doing with the power supply? The PSU looks like a regular usb c PD supply to me (even supports 12v, nice!)
Edit: wtf! 5v@5a yeah thats non standard. What were they thinking?
I'm assuming it's like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn't really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it's not too bad.
Well, I don't expect more from ot rather than low-power home server.
the community's* open-source efforts
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. https://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.
Thank you very much for pointing this out! It seems I‘ll have to read up on this stuff for my next home automation project.
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.
Ok, I can buy a quad core thin client for $30. The prices for these are too high for what they are.
Does it have dual band wifi, wide software support, dual 4k output at 60hz, 4gb of ddr4, NVME support via addon?
Your cheap thin client likely isn't a modern computer. The PI 5 is, and costing another $30 isnt exactly a roaring failure.
It comes with built in storage and a power supply, plus a passive cooling system, a case obviously, and removable RAM up to 16gb. It has dual display port, idk about resolution, I run it headless anyway. There is also a bigger version with a pice slot.
I'm just hoping rockchip gets better kernel support. They are way better positioned on the CxB scale.
There was some stuff in a recent kernel release or rc. I don't know what though
$100 for no h265 hardware encoding.
Hard pass.
But you can get a used thinkcentre tiny mini micro on ebay for $80. Wtf would I spend 100+ on a pi?
Yeah I am loving all these micro Linux computer options. Not much bigger than a raspberry pi but it's a full computer. If you need gpio you can hook up an Arduino through USB and connect super easily. The one I have been using even has an integrated video card. All for around $100 and they are always in stock lol.
Yup. I use one for DNS / pihole / remote into network. Already tiny, easily replaceable parts and any OS. I do prefer the dells over Lenovo though.
can you link to one? i am interested
first search "thinkcentre i5" https://www.ebay.com/itm/335211475014?hash=item4e0c293046:g:cxAAAOSwxidkleZb
Too many other options to be excited about their offerings anymore
Such as? I've been looking to buy one recently. Are there any you could recommend for an amateur that wants to host totally random small services on a microcomputer?
I’m not the one you replied to, but I bought an Odroid when it was difficult to get a pi. I wouldn’t say it’s in the same category. It’s bigger, more expensive than normal pi prices and more powerful. It’s probably perfect for what you’re looking for. Where you might run into trouble is if you have very tight power consumption requirements or plan to use add on boards.
What are some good other options? I haven't kept up with the advances with this stuff in a few years.
The power button and RTC are my two favorite additions lol
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.
Yeah that's valid for that use case. Good thing they still allow the jumper
I need a lot of good CM4's. I hope they're still ramping those up 😞
Cool! More ewaste and destruction of the environment during a climate emergency!
