Having followed rpi from the start, I suspect the choice of "200" is a marketing ploy to make the potential customers compare it to a refurb laptop. The company has a good product with a massive peripheral market, and you can open it up and add bells and whistles (literally). And a mechanical keyboard! I'd get one in an instant except my pi 5 with a Bluetooth keyboard is still going strong.
Raspberry Pi 500+
201–210 of 309 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#202I'm confused by the use case for this. The keyboard gets a cable running to a monitor. Might need a power cable as well but let's assume usbc covers both. An alternative is a raspberry pi on the vesa mount, or attached to the monitor arm. The cable to a keyboard is now optional, wireless USB being much easier than wireless displayport. Keyboard can now be flat too. When is this a good idea?
The marketing blurb that's linked makes it quite clear that this targets retro hobbyists, who want a modern take on the C64. It's not really meant to be a practical design. It still is a more practical design than a flat keyboard, which only masochists would use willingly.
I think this is a wrist geometry thing. A macbook dock that lifted the back, putting the keyboard on a slant, did serious damage to my wrists over the period of a year or so. That was the better part of a decade ago.
They've slowly partially healed since changing to a keyboard parallel to the desk surface. There are climbing moves I still cannot do because of it. Ymmv.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really? If you want super low cost, they have the zero w2, the rpi2, the rpi3, etc. I feel they've already mostly perfected the products for that purpose. But of course they don't want to just 'stop building', so now they're moving up to more premium options. I feel there's nothing wrong with this. If you want the low cost exploration, stick with the things they designed forever ago, which fit that purpose.
A $80 x86 mini PC is wildly more powerful than prior Pis - at least so far as my home assistant use-case goes (Pi 4). Of course, the Pi is still king of power consumption (where x86 has improved, somewhat) and form-factor. - $200 PC: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266099800893 - Core i5 @ 3GHz - $80 PC: https://www.ebay.com/itm/135697152406 - Core i3 @ 3.5GHz So Pi is really filling a niche where you want form-factor, perf…
That $200 PC has $150 shipping and another $150 import duties
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't add a new screen. You plug it into the family TV. Just like you did in the eighties when you were a kid learning to program with your Speccy or c64 or whatever. Mom or Dad or your siblings can hang out and comment on what you're doing with it. That's the experience Raspberry has been claiming to want to reproduce since they first came onto the scene in 2012, despite them not getting around to stuffing a Pi…
Or you plug it into one of your old monitors. We all have them laying around.
Ever since I had my own source of income, I've only bought laptops and I do not possess any monitor (old or new) at home.
Writing this, I just realized that even at work, we only have a single monitor. And it's stored on a shelf not even plugged.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a combination of things: 1) The company "sold out". That is, in times of limited supply they prioritized fulfilling large compute module orders instead of the hobbyist market that initially supported them. To be fair if I was running that company I'd have done the exact same thing, it's obviously the right financial choice. Just, you know, it'll sting for the market that was shunned. 2) They got expens…
This is why I am negative on them. Apart from point 1, which I didn't really care about at the time. And SDCards. Who kept making that decision?
No pointing device, which means you need an external mouse, no big deal except then you need a desk to put under the mouse. Unlike a laptop with a built in pointing device, so you can use it on your lap like its name suggests. Making that mistake in the 400 was, ok fine, a mistake. Perpetuating it to the 500 and now the 500+ just seems malicious.
And yeah, people say clip-on trackball, but I haven't seen one that fits on the 400 case and doesn't cost a bundle. Links would be appreciated.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#206All the marketing for this advertises it as a desktop computer. What's the appeal of this compared to a cheaper and more powerful N150 NUC, or a used mini PC if it's for personal use where you just need one? A N150 has about twice the CPU performance, hardware video decoding that isn't crippled, and much more software built for its architecture among other things.
Right, this thing is priced from an earlier (pre-BeeLink) era. There’s just so much more you can get for $200 nowadays, right off Amazon.
I hadn't looked lately but you're right. Intel N150 @3.6Ghz mini-PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB M.2 SSD, 3 USB 3.2 ports (10gbps) and dual 2.5 Gbps Ethernet all for $199 delivered tomorrow. https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Lake-N100-Mini-Computer-Suppo....
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#207That's a nice gadget. But now: raspeberry's company has tons of money and demonstrated its ability to deliver good quality, inexpensive computers.
So WHY don't they make a linux mobile PHONE ?
That would change a lot of things
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#208is it with or without a cooling fan?
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you plug it into one of your old monitors. We all have them laying around.
Ever since I had my own source of income, I've only bought laptops and I do not possess any monitor (old or new) at home. Writing this, I just realized that even at work, we only have a single monitor. And it's stored on a shelf not even plugged.
If that's the only thing keeping you from buying and using a raspberry pi, you can get secondhand monitors or TVs for $20 or so.
Re: Raspberry Pi 500+
#210What's the point of this? Where does it fit, who is it aimed at apart from Explaining Computers and good old Jeff Geerling (hiya Jeff!). Maybe if it has been designed into a retro style case or something? As it stands it's very hard to see who would want this.
This one has been on my radar as a first computer for my son for a while - just lock out the wifi and set it up with a "boot to basic" image maybe? Certainly something which could grow to support some Arduino work. EDIT: Admittedly this would be a no brainer if there was an off-the-shelf Atari ST style thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST purely for the sheer mass providing some protection.
I think this "boot to basic" idea fails with contemporary software. Just basic thought experiment. When was last time you did any project with full knowledge of what exactly you were going to use? And by full I mean every single software library and tool down to specific version. These days you need to be able to pull dependencies or tools from Internet. Anything else would be just torturing or wasting yourself.
It made sense when you did not have infra build for distributing things and things made were pretty simple. Now I feel like it would be just waste of time.