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.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 60 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 50 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social -4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Which nuc did you get for that money? Is that NUC actually faster than the Pi 5? I've seen a ton of people claiming this and then it actually wasn't. I mean, it that's what's on offer where you live, great! It's certainly harder to find where I am. Is an SD card that expensive where you are? I mean, a SanDisk Extreme blahblah 256gb is 25 bucks here. Case costs about 5 to 10 bucks. Power supply is Free. Most ppl have a USB power supply capable of running a pi at hand.

Why wouldn't the zero 2w have the ability to run peripherals? Of course it can. Besides: why would I want to run peripherals and a display on my pihole?

[–] JDubbleu@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not the person you're replying to, but I bought an Optiplex 5050 with an i7-7700 for $75 to use as a server because an RPi 5 is more expensive and way less powerful. It even has a CD drive.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 0 points 9 months ago

Well, i'd ditch that one for it's power consumption (65w tdp is like a lot for a server) but that may not be an issue to you. Situations differ, needs differ. I had a quick look around at eBay and the like where I am and all I could get for that price was a crappy i3 4xxx or comparable, so you might see why the raspberry is a good offer to me.

That's why I'm against flat-out "yeah, the pi is not worth it" or "the pi is the bee's knees" statements. It's a tool among many and ought to be used as such and I dislike when there is this mob mentality pro or Contra anything. The pi has it's uses and there are.many cases where it's not the ideal option. I'll never recommend the pi or anything else flat out.

[–] aniki@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know why there is so much Opposition to the pi

It's been explained to you several times now.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social -4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 0 points 10 months ago

PCIe is mainly for SSDs, you don't need those things with that.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Single lane PCIe

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 0 points 10 months ago

Enough for Storage usually

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 13 points 10 months ago

I'd rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] Pringles@lemm.ee 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They'll probably be available on Amazon eventually

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago

Oh cool! I didn't know about this. Thanks for sharing.