It's worth mentioning you're paying a $45 Adafruit tax here. Adafruit charges more for Pis.
pt's therapy bills get expensive fast.
Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
321–330 of 354 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#322[dead]
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microcenter doubled the price of the 500+ kit shortly after I bought one. Still $90 cheaper than Adafruit, unsurprisingly.
> unsurprisingly I'm unsure what is meant here. Does Microcenter usually have very cheap prices, or the opposite for Adafruit?
Both. Microcenter tends to sell Raspberry Pi hardware at MSRP, and occasionally on sale a couple bucks below MSRP.
Adafruit tends to be a bit more expensive. It's never bothered me since I like the company and its service, but I think pretty much anything you buy there ought to be purchased with the thought that you're prototyping and if you want to buy many parts for a final product, you'll eventually want to source parts somewhere else. (or, I assume, call Adafruit and try to negotiate a better price)
It's understandable enough why both companies are this way. Microcenter is a retail chain and can do things Adafruit cannot. (in truth, they are partners on some things, so it's more complicated than that - the point is that Microcenter is a much larger company)
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#324It'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…
8GB of LPDDR memory is around $100 in volume. 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.
Assume the numbers are correct, Pi spent $100 for a PCB with some components; Neo's hardware includes keyboard, 13 inch display, aluminum chassis, battery, charger. You remove the costs of the above from that $500.
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"? Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs
I'm sure Microcenter is not selling Pi Zeroes at a loss. They're an authorized retailer selling at the part's MSRP. They do sometimes make these available only in store, not online, once they sell out online and I don't think it's a mystery why a retail business would do that.
Why are you so confident? Raspberry Pi's prospectus says "unit gross profit margin of 20 per cent. for us and 10 per cent. for our ARs" and they give an example: "sell it to our ARs for $90, which in turn would sell it to the end user for $100". AR=Approved Resellers and delivery costs are paid by the reseller.
Is 10%/$1.50 enough to pay for the retailer's freight, ~3% fee to accept credit cards, inventory carrying, rent, payroll, shrinkage, support/RMA, and fraud?
https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/Portal/NI-000098822/NI...
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re not allowed to sell keyboard and mice with USB-A port? Doubt it. Can you link the source you’re quoting? Edit: It’s this right? https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-common-c... That’s only for battery powered devices afaik.
Got it. I guess some people still use wired mice and keyboards with legacy connectors. But how many of those use them on a $350 board? Seems like a very small use case. I personally use Bluetooth for that, been doing that for the past 20 years.
You insist on calling it legacy connectors, but they are just perfectly good current day connectors to connect a keyboard, a video game controller, a USB drive, a printer, a scanner or the Bluetooth dongle for your Bluetooth mouse. I think only Apple decided that it was deprecated for them because it did not allow them to make their laptops thin enough to their taste. Meanwhile the rest of the world is perfectly fine with it for many use cases. You might also not believe it, but I also still use HDMI cables for screens, like a caveman ;)
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's more than one Pi Zero 2 W -- one with headers, and one without. Are you looking at both? Headerless version is out-of-stock for my nearest Microcenter (Columbus, Ohio): https://www.microcenter.com/product/643085/raspberry-pi-zero... But they say they have 25+ of the version that comes with headers: https://www.microcenter.com/product/683270/raspberry-pi-rasp...
Second link says sold out.
Still 25+ available for me, in Columbus, Ohio. In-store only, limit 1 per household.
I'd pick one up when I'm in the area this weekend...but I'm not into the scalping/arbitrage game, and I've already got a few Pi Zero Ws kicking around without a purpose that are still overkill for lots of things. (I may have bought too many of those back when Microcenter was selling them for half of MSRP at $5.)
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering? Yes, I think so. With strong caveats. I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b). I just p…
> If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android. These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.
Yeah, probably. So is the Android phone that I bought for $64 that I take with me everywhere.
My war is already lost. Reaping the spoils of assimilation is only natural.
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can get a (used) fanless laptop and a USB GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN/whatever adapter for that money. Raspberry Pis started at ~$30 for a minimal configuration. They were so cheap that they killed the whole overpriced range of $100 to $200 dev boards by vendors that tried to make money of dev boards for their chips. They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.
But the result is huge, you cannot 3d print a custom case for that and put it somewhere at home…
You might be surprised how small a laptop motherboard can be. Once you take away screen, keyboard, battery, speakers, daughter boards and all that, you can have an actively cooled motherboard as slim as a pi and not much bigger.
If you need something really tiny, an esp32 can do a lot of what we used to use a pi for. Driving an eink display for example
Re: Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
#330Pi's attraction was that it was a cheap hobby computer. I could buy a whole laptop for that money. I know RAM prices are crazy right now, but I just bought a 16gb Ryzen 7 motherboard to repair an IdeaPad for €70
But no ethernet port, no GPIO, no fanless. It's comparing two completely different usecases.
Plenty of laptops have Ethernet, and as for fanless, a lot of people choose active cooling for a pi5