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At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

pcworld.com

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Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#41

Post by tssva »

regularfry wrote: post #14
kytazo wrote: post #4

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

Quantity has a quality all of its own. Nothing else has quite the same scale. It doesn't hurt that the OS is a very well-supported Debian derivative, but the uniformity of the ecosystem is a massive benefit you don't really get anywhere else.

Raspberry Pi OS is a well-supported Debian derivative but there are a wide variety of operating systems available for the Pi. I don't run Raspberry Pi OS on any of my Pi's. That being said, I do run a Debian derivative on a few of my Pi's, Ubuntu server. I run OpenWRT on 2 Pi's and Fedora Desktop on another.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#42

Post by Roark66 »

>"...should began this July..."

Seriously? Should?

How. Many. Times. Have we heard it already?

In the timeless words of George W Bush Junior "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... Wait, I can't be fooled again!"

No way I'm going to get hopeful here and then pi locator will show one pi zero 2 W in entire Europe, in the one shop in Belgium the owner of refuses to ship out of his country...

How many cool open source projects could we have by now on other boards that remained available throughout this time if the liers at the Pi foundation (and people that believed them) didn't tell us every few weeks for last X years "it's only few weeks. We're making millions, this will all resolve the next quarter the latest!" All Bull**!

I've been saying it since year 2 of the shortage. Those Pis are not coming back. If your favourite project uses raspberry pi encourage them to support another board. If they(the foundation) was honest from the start and said "look guys, we've burned through all the charitable donation money and this business model is unsustainable, we have to pivot" I would have some respect for them, but not this.

Having said that I also have to submit some self critique. In my own projects it has been oh so much easier to just pull one of my remaining rpi zero 2w from the drawer (it has to be zero because I'm mostly doing RC stuff) and put something together in a day vs developing software for months. Still Rockchip has gotten a lot better with their documentation. It's not a documentation a not so technical user can take and run with it, but for developers it is perfectly usable. Now if we (developers) just wanted to use those other boards seriously...

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#43

Post by kkielhofner »

kytazo wrote: post #27
igou wrote: post #16

ARM SBC entry costs have jumped upwards of $100 and low powered Intel machines (used thin clients, nucs, workstations) have become more accessible than ever. When the 4 was brand new, 4 cores/4gb was pretty killer for the entry price. The Pi had an incredible impact but it's pretty obvious it doesn't fit very well into a lot of usecases any more given other options. I hope that over the next few years the Pi foundati…

Yes but when you compare the TDP and compute/watt of such a system compared to an arm sbc it pales in comparison. Being fan-less hence much more compact is another thing they lack as well.

NUC and other platforms get down to single-digit watts idle. I have a much larger, very performant Ryzen 7 system that idles at 30 watts with an Nvidia GTX 1070. The GTX 1070 alone is 10w idle and tiny (under 1 sec) 70 watt peaks for inference in my various uses (the fan doesn't even start). The x86_64 architecture has come a long way in terms of energy usage and even the much older NUCs, thin clients, etc can pretty easily get to the 10 watt range.

I'm not one for wasting energy but 30 watts at 24/7 usage at some of the highest energy costs in the world ($0.23/kWh) comes to roughly $5/mo and enables many, many, many things that just aren't fundamentally possible (or very ill-advised) with a Raspberry Pi.

For me personally I'm more in the $0.12/kWh range and I can run this system, with a crazy amount of functionality, for around $3/mo.

Yes a Raspberry Pi would be something like $0.26/mo but a few dollars a month is completely unnoticeable in a typical household utility bill. The level of your toaster or how long you microwave leftovers adds up to be significantly greater.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#44

Post by washadjeffmad »

kytazo wrote: post #4

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

Chromeboxes, ThinkCentre M-series, OptiPlex Micros and 7070 Ultras, Intel J-series boards, etc have been around since before the supply chain disruptions, but I have so many projects built around and parts for rpi that I can't as easily scale or retool.

I think their scarcity has made us all appreciate what having consistent low-power SBC platforms with convenient programmable interfaces is. I found uses for every Pi 0/2/3/4 I had that had been sitting disused because I was too excited to move to 4s when I really didn't need more power.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#45

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

botanical wrote: post #32

I feel like the Raspberry Pi foundation hasn't met its objective of computers being accessible to everyone (eg. children). The Pi itself is prohibitively expensive, and it looks like they cater to companies first. Arduino and it open sourcing the hardware meant very cheap but less powerful SBCs. I hope to see something in a similar vein from them.

Until there was a chip shortage, they really did meet that obligation.

The decision that nobody likes that they had to take, surely, was to try to preserve the commercial ecosystem that exists around their products, not least because a) it helps them achieve the economies of scale that make the devices cheap, and b) so many of those commercial products have educational implications.

The Foundation is quite literally not responsible for the devices being prohibitively expensive, and indeed as far as I can see, when official resellers regain stock, they do so at prices very close to the pre-crisis prices, when you take into account rampant general inflation. The Zero 2W is going to be slightly more expensive. The Pi 4B seems to be at the same price.

And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_; I would argue they are still achieving things on that level, because many of their activities are more general than the Pi.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#46

Post by euniceee3 »

tjoff wrote: post #18
euniceee3 wrote: post #10

The shortage ruined the brand for me. Any sort of commercial product based on this cheap platform had supply issues, which caused a pivot. I had an old boss balk at me for suggesting we use Pi's back in 2013, I now see why. Glad to see the gouging finally come to an end!

How is that the brands fault? For better or worse they even prioritized commercial products despite it not being their core audience.

This is the first I am hearing about the commercial support on this. I had no idea my EIN was so powerful. The brand in my mind is 100% hobby because if I was able to source enough for prototyping (which was not possible over the last 18 months without getting gouged) then sticking with tried and true platforms was the only path forward. Not trying to be cheeky, just surprised the prioritization for commercial products was not publicized more.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#47

Post by tjoff »

wittenbunk wrote: post #34
tjoff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that the brands fault? For better or worse they even prioritized commercial products despite it not being their core audience.

How is the impact of the brands choices the fault of the brand? Did you forget an /s?

Their choice can most certainly be questioned, but in this case the choice favored the use-case OP was talking about. So if anything it should have strengthened the brand image from that point of view.

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#49

Post by magicalhippo »

leidenfrost wrote: post #40
kkielhofner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or tryi…

I'm looking for a noiseless low power NAS solution. Any recommendations? After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.

Get a NUC or mini-ITX system and a fanless case[1][2]?

[1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER....

[2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...

Re: At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

#50

Post by euniceee3 »

wittenbunk wrote: post #34
tjoff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that the brands fault? For better or worse they even prioritized commercial products despite it not being their core audience.

How is the impact of the brands choices the fault of the brand? Did you forget an /s?

It was mentioned as a footnote in the Dec 2022 update. Seems like a miss by the marketing team. My bad for missing this and only seeing the headlines.
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