101–110 of 354 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like all the USB-A devices purchased over the past 30 years have not been trashed and some people still use them.
Understandable but I would have preferred a couple of fully functional USB-C ports and then have people use dongles for using old hardware on this board. Similar to using a serial adapter.
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together. I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.
Pi 5 8GB is $200
MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..
So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.
If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.
Are Raspberry Pis (UK country of origin) exempt from the 10% baseline import tariff?
Are they actually made in the UK? I'd presume they're shipped from China like most tech goods.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are...
I really struggle to see where this fits in to most use cases. The appeal of the Pi back in the first iterations was being a relatively cheap linux computer with GPIO.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction. Pi 5 8GB is $200 MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad.. So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a c…
That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin.
That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo.
That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.
It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.
If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.
If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?
we've lost the plot. this is no longer a hobbyist computer.
I really don't know who this is targeted at. As a development board these are extremely expensive and as a mini computer you're far better off with something N100 based or similar. What market is this trying to compete in?