8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75 • Hacker News Board

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#41

Post by intsunny » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

I am strongly hoping that the 8GB Rpi + NexDock would be a good low cost laptop for web browsing, text editing and terminal.

I've been turned off from investing in a new laptop for a variety of reasons:

- Apple has made questionable hardware design decisions lately. If Louis Rossmann is to be believed, the T2 chip + secureboot situation is just as bad as the old keyboard situation. It sucks having no say over the hardware.

- Apple's newest Catalina OS has been strangely unstable for many (including me) and is headed in a strange direction. It sucks having no say over the software.

- Intel's chip vulnerabilities are too many and too confusing to keep track of. While their chips are advertised as "Quad core @ 2.4Ghz", I wonder what the actual performance is when all the kernel protections are enabled.

- AMD's Ryzen 4000 products look amazing, but (almost?) none of the laptops are 13" with high quality screens.

A "laptop" composed of 8GB Rpi + NexDock would allow me much greater control of the hardware and software.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#42

Post by dijit » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:33 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #38

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the US. In my EU country(Austria) second hand hardware prices are through the roof. There's no way you're getting anything half decent from the last decade for $75. And then there's the cooling and power consumption difference between a 10 year old system and a RPi. It's not even close.

I don't know where you are in the EU but UK refurbishers constantly sell post-lease desktops and laptops on ebay for around £50, shipping to any EU country is usually £10-20 on top of that, if anything. Like this kind of stuff: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Lenovo-Intel-i3-Dual-Core-i5-Q... Is plentiful and easy to buy, again - ships anywhere in the EU. As for the power consumption - I have to disagree again, I have…

UK is generally an outlier when it comes to the second hand market for some reason.

Our used cars go for peanuts compared to used cars in the mainland for example.

I am often trawling the UK ebay for tech stuff because it's so much cheaper than Blocket (a craigslist-like) here in Sweden.

PS: very very pedantically and technically, UK isn't an EU member any longer. Although there is some limbo period.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#43

Post by davnicwil » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

Interesting announcements at the end of the article:

- Rasbian will be renamed to Rasberry Pi OS

- They're adding a 64-bit variant in addition to the existing 32-bit

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#44

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:38 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #38

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the US. In my EU country(Austria) second hand hardware prices are through the roof. There's no way you're getting anything half decent from the last decade for $75. And then there's the cooling and power consumption difference between a 10 year old system and a RPi. It's not even close.

I don't know where you are in the EU but UK refurbishers constantly sell post-lease desktops and laptops on ebay for around £50, shipping to any EU country is usually £10-20 on top of that, if anything. Like this kind of stuff: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Lenovo-Intel-i3-Dual-Core-i5-Q... Is plentiful and easy to buy, again - ships anywhere in the EU. As for the power consumption - I have to disagree again, I have…

I'm in Austria and second hand systems with an i7/i5, 8Gb RAM and an SSD go for around/over $200 not $85.

For $85 I can only find core2duo/quad 4gb RAM and spinning rust so there's no way that is a viable alternative for a RPi.

Maybe UK is an outlier or Austria is, I don't know.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#45

Post by phonon » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

intsunny wrote: post #41

I am strongly hoping that the 8GB Rpi + NexDock would be a good low cost laptop for web browsing, text editing and terminal. I've been turned off from investing in a new laptop for a variety of reasons: - Apple has made questionable hardware design decisions lately. If Louis Rossmann is to be believed, the T2 chip + secureboot situation is just as bad as the old keyboard situation. It sucks having no say over the har…

> - AMD's Ryzen 4000 products look amazing, but (almost?) none of the laptops are 13" with high quality screens.

Check out the Xiaomi RedmiBook 13 (100% sRGB coverage).

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#46

Post by Orochikaku » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:45 AM UTC

smileybarry wrote: post #28

kart23 wrote: post #21

This is cool. Whats really holding it back at this point is it's use of a sd card. I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and its often bottlenecked by I/O. It might just be my SD card, but executing trivial commands sometimes takes forever and reminds me that I'm in a pi. I've heard ssds can improve speeds a lot, but you still cant boot off usb.

USB boot is coming, beta started a week ago: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=274595

Here's a video tutorial on how to utilise this to boot on an SSD by an awesome small electronics hacker:

https://youtu.be/zVhYvvrGhMU

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#47

Post by terrywang » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:45 AM UTC

Just about to grab 2 Pi 4 GB models, will put on hold for price adjustments..

This is really exciting, Pi 4 8GB with support for booting from USB SSD makes a cheap workstation option, many other possibilities as well as server in the garage to replace some VPS in cloud? (for general purpose workloads, can the CPU keep up if 8GB memory is saturated, consider general purpose use cases, memory-bound workloads may work well).

Side note: My original Pi 1 is still running Pi-Hole 5.0 fronted by nginx + php-fpm on Raspbian 10, working well for the home LAN ;-)

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#48

Post by youngtaff » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

I'd like a Pi with built in POE and eMMC support

Something like the profile of the original Ubiquiti CloudKey would be ideal (don't need most of the ports on the Pi)

https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-cloud-key/

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#49

Post by cat199 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

intsunny wrote: post #41

I am strongly hoping that the 8GB Rpi + NexDock would be a good low cost laptop for web browsing, text editing and terminal. I've been turned off from investing in a new laptop for a variety of reasons: - Apple has made questionable hardware design decisions lately. If Louis Rossmann is to be believed, the T2 chip + secureboot situation is just as bad as the old keyboard situation. It sucks having no say over the har…

Interesting thought -

how do you plan to power the Pi? seems this would more be a 'portable' than a 'laptop'

Also - there is the 'pi top' kit if that suits your fancy.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#50

Post by Legogris » Thu, May 28, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #21

This is cool. Whats really holding it back at this point is it's use of a sd card. I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and its often bottlenecked by I/O. It might just be my SD card, but executing trivial commands sometimes takes forever and reminds me that I'm in a pi. I've heard ssds can improve speeds a lot, but you still cant boot off usb.

You actually can boot straight from USB as of very recently.

Something you've always been able to do is to keep just the boot partition on a small SD card and the root on whatever USB device you like. And yes, even with the supposedly best-performing SD cards, they easily become a problem both with performance and failure.