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.

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.

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

Damn. Looked decent until I got to $30 on shipping.

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.

Also if you get a slightly bigger form factor, you can just buy a much better one.

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

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.

Damn that sucks. I appreciate raspberry pis but unfortunate to hear all this

The price is more or less the same as it’s always been, where is this nonsense 300% coming from? Are you quoting scalper prices as retail?

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I think operating at 5V input might be a technical constraint for them. Compatibility revisions for existing hardware are a lot more difficult if the input voltage is 9x higher. Addressing that isn’t as easy as slapping a buck converter on the board.

Not saying requiring 5A was the right call, just that I can see reasons for not using USB-PD.

They used 1 resistor for CC1 and CC2. The fix and correct implementation was to use one resistor per CC-line (two in total).

Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don’t understand why they haven’t explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you’re using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can’t use any normal USB charger with it.

But it does support usb pd, starting with pi 5, you can use any usb pd power source, so long as it can provide the needed wattage

I’d recommend Orange Pi 5 plus. It’s much more expandable than OP 5.

Thank you for your recommendation. I’ve looked at some of those SoCs and they’re impressive but none of them do what I’m looking for. I want to make a graveyard for my old GPUs, but without the power overhead I have right now with them configured as essentially a mining rig that’s folding proteins instead of guessing the hash. I understand that the potential power saved by using ARM or RISC over x86/64 is a few dozen watts at best and chosing an SoC over a desktop platform hamstrings any opportunity for scaling, but it’s been a dream project of mine for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be practical.

Whenever I am doing different projects I go with RasPi alternatives. I agree they’re cheaper and superior.

It breaks if you look at it the wrong way.

It’s pretty good ddr4, but okay. You can have 8Gb of ddr4 for another $20. Not exactly a bank burner for a server or client.

How about the other features? Does that 8GB ddr3 computer have dual band wifi? Dual monitor 4k support at 60hz? Native hardware hevc/vp9 decoding?

Id love to see a link to these $30 PC people are talking about. Even older SFF aren’t going for $30 generally, unless youre buying in lots.

Can you beat a raspi 5 with a recent-ish SFF going for $200? You bet, but that flips the “pi is bad value for the money” on its head.

When I found myself in that same situation I ended up getting a board from libre.computer. I’ve been nothing but happy with it and they’re only $35.

I unloaded my pi 4 on eBay those past summer because the prices were so high and got the thin client for cheaper. No regrets.

Yes, but it’s a hassle. I bought a 4gb from digikey a few weeks ago. They have a list of stock on their site, although it looks like they are currently out. They are a b2b seller, so you need to verify your identity to buy from them, but they will sell you 1 or 2 Raspi 5s directly.

All that said, the article is about Raspi ramping up production. It will get easier to buy them soon.

You can always check RPiLocator.com. Looks like there is a reasonable supply in Europe for the Pi 5, and some variant or other is available in many places worldwide.

That’s a 2013 CPU. Pretty ancient, likely no modern codec hardware support. Also look like it hits a 208 on geekbench 5 single treaded, where a raspi 5 is getting 574. Multi treaded, you have the above at 708, versus the Raspi 5’s 1608.

So just off the cuff on the cpu, the +$30 raspi5 has 3x single thread speed, and 2x multithread speed. The PI does even better on newer tests. That doesnt take into account the large improvements to RAM either that you get going from decade old ddr3 to ddr4, or wifi 5, or being able to add an nvme, etc. Looks to me that youre getting a lot more computer in a $60 raspi5 than this $30 sff.

Im betting this $30 sff stacks up better against a $30 raspi 4, in which case, yeah, that tracks.

I was thinking more along the lines of battery powered operations. I can stick a Pi, a car battery, a solar panel into a weather proof box and set it in the woods if I needed to.

thank you. that’s a good deal.