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The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

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Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#171

Post by jrockway »

tmaly wrote: post #148
LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

I wonder if they will sell you more than one Raspberry Pi Zero? The Zero is advertised as being $5, and it makes me angry every time, because it's not possible to buy it at that price. Every Pi retailer either has a one-per-customer limit, and charges shipping, or, charges up to $15(!) per Zero if you buy more than one. So it's essentially a $15 device being advertised as $5. I shouldn't be so annoyed about it, but I…

I have managed to buy a Pi zero for $5 at a Micro Center store.

They were $3.14 last March. Their bigger brothers were not $22.07, though.

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#172

Post by starik36 »

penguinlinux wrote: post #10
steve19 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is selling to for $5. Adafruit sells it for $10 excluding shipping, ebay sellers have it listed for about $15/10 GBP with free shipping. The price really is a lie for consumers. Maybe $5 refers to the price they sell to distributors, who need to mark it up.

Microcenter sells them for 5 dollars. This is the first unit. I happen to have one close to my home so I've been able to buy a few of them, I just buy one each time i go there. I am building retropie machines for my friends so i get them for 5 bucks. you can only buy one pi zero w for 5 dollars. but you can always come back and buy more.

I've tried building a retropi box on a regular RPi and it was too slow for anything but original NES games.

How are you able to build these with Pi Zero?

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#173

Post by driverdan »

tfolbrecht wrote: post #140
LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

I wonder if they will sell you more than one Raspberry Pi Zero? The Zero is advertised as being $5, and it makes me angry every time, because it's not possible to buy it at that price. Every Pi retailer either has a one-per-customer limit, and charges shipping, or, charges up to $15(!) per Zero if you buy more than one. So it's essentially a $15 device being advertised as $5. I shouldn't be so annoyed about it, but I…

When they saw C.H.I.P. and other arm dev boards were coming to eat their lunch, they instituted these anti competitive practices. Think of that $10 off as a bribe so that RP Foundation can continue to dominate.

Unfortunately CHIP folded a while ago.

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#174

Post by gmiller123456 »

sswu wrote: post #38
LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

I wonder if they will sell you more than one Raspberry Pi Zero? The Zero is advertised as being $5, and it makes me angry every time, because it's not possible to buy it at that price. Every Pi retailer either has a one-per-customer limit, and charges shipping, or, charges up to $15(!) per Zero if you buy more than one. So it's essentially a $15 device being advertised as $5. I shouldn't be so annoyed about it, but I…

This post on the forums [0] is the best answer I've read yet. They sell the Pi Zero (W) at such a low price to promote the platform for educational and non-commercial purposes. However, the margins are so low at that price that they cannot afford to sell in bulk. They apparently do offer bulk buys (>500 [1]) at higher prices. The few options to buy multiple are to buy kits (which basically pass that bulk pricing in t…

Actually, the better answer is the part of your [0] reference that you didn't copy:

"* In effect, since the Zero(W) would cannibalise sales from the other models, we lose the profit margin we would make on the P3. Cannot afford to do that in quantity."

Or, more specifically, their intent is to undercut any manufacturer that would want to make a very low cost board at a sustainable profit margin to prevent one from taking hold.

You can buy as many Orange Pi Zero's (with WiFi) as you want, any day of the year for $12.76 (the price goes even down slightly if you buy more than one) [1].

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=198705#p1... [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-Orange-Pi-Zero-...

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#175

Post by tombert »

Since the goal of this might be hacking in general, do you think it's possible that they'd sell something like an ODroid in one of these stores? Most of my hacking in ARM land has been with an ODroid for the last couple years just due to the amount of power you get from them.

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#176

Post by nexuist »

snvzz wrote: post #167

I lost faith on Raspberry Pi when they went anti-consumer by implementing some DRM bullshit[0] using their firmware blob together with a dedicated crypto chip in their camera accessory to prevent third party cameras from working. Nevermind the extracted key that's circulating through the net: The crypto chip is itself not cheap and totally unnecessary if not for the DRM. So, until they backtrack and apologize for the…

....Can't you just use a USB camera?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/webcams/

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#177

Post by semi-extrinsic »

alias_neo wrote: post #91
sswu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post on the forums [0] is the best answer I've read yet. They sell the Pi Zero (W) at such a low price to promote the platform for educational and non-commercial purposes. However, the margins are so low at that price that they cannot afford to sell in bulk. They apparently do offer bulk buys (>500 [1]) at higher prices. The few options to buy multiple are to buy kits (which basically pass that bulk pricing in t…

Although this may work in general, it hurts the very purpose of the Pi. I have an open source project I've been working on for some time, it's based around the Pi Zero W, however, here in the UK it's practically impossible to get more than one Zero W unless you order individually from each site and pay shipping individually for each. Even then, you'll be paying at least £12+shipping per unit. It's wasteful and needle…

Just curious: what is the use case where the Pi Zero W is better than, say, an ESP8266 as in the Wemos/Lolin D1 mini board? Those you can actually buy in bulk for $4.

From my point of view, the fragility of having to deal with a microSD card makes a Pi-like solution a complete non-starter if you want to scale.

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#178

Post by Nursie »

classic959 wrote: post #145
Nursie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, my experience with the orange pi zero was similar. But then I've been playing with debian on embedded boards since the NSLU2 days, so I guess I'm probably a little blind to the challenges. Any build that doesn't start with a multimeter, a soldering iron and a TTL->USB cable is pretty straightforward...

I used the 'slug' (NSLU2) to run my first NAS. For me, that was a great introduction to setting up useful linux devices on my home network. (A wee pang of nostagia there when I saw it mentioned)

Nice, I had two slugs. The community and Wiki were awesome. I eventually ended up adding a page about soldering a USB wireless card on to one of the unused USB headers on one. The other ran my website and an email server.

Happy days :)

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#179

Post by jwr »

snvzz wrote: post #167

I lost faith on Raspberry Pi when they went anti-consumer by implementing some DRM bullshit[0] using their firmware blob together with a dedicated crypto chip in their camera accessory to prevent third party cameras from working. Nevermind the extracted key that's circulating through the net: The crypto chip is itself not cheap and totally unnecessary if not for the DRM. So, until they backtrack and apologize for the…

I have done some hardware design work with the RPi Compute Module and two CSI cameras. There is indeed an authentication chip on the cameras you buy from the RPi foundation. From what I understand, the idea here is to limit the drivers, so that the auto-tuning software (adjusting color balance, brightness, etc) only works with the original camera, not with clones.

There is nothing that prevents you from connecting other CSI cameras (there are plenty available), or writing other drivers. It's just that the auto-tuning functions of the original drivers will only be enabled for original cameras. The driver authenticates the camera(s) at startup, and if they are not the original ones, disables the auto-tuning.

The Foundation says it is a way of securing a revenue stream and recovering some of the cost of R&D work that went into the drivers. I can see how that is a compromise that could be chosen.

Personally, while I am not a fan of locked-down solutions, I find it hard to get as outraged at this as some other people apparently are.

Re: The Raspberry Pi store is much cooler than an Apple Store

#180

Post by kingosticks »

vageli wrote: post #141
richardwhiuk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the Pi is to get kids a computer they can play with. I struggle to see how your inability to buy lots of Pis disagrees with that.

> The purpose of the Pi is to get kids a computer they can play with. Where did you get that idea? From the raspberry pi website: > Our mission is to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

Yes, that is their tagline. Take a look at their strategy document[0] if you want to understand why the parent's interpretation is more accurate.

[0]: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

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