It’s like $100 per board now once you add a power supply and a case. More if you also add storage. Cheapest Intel system on Amazon is $139. The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.
The lower-end, power-efficient market is being rapidly devoured by the ESP32. A $20 Pi will still use much more power than an ESP32 while also being less reliable and still 3x the price.
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
> The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability
No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.
Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.
If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
Latest Raspberry Pis are expensive but also quite powerful. If you want a cheap single board computer that can run Linux, you have the Pi Zero ($15). You also have the Pico ($4), which is an alternative to the ESP32.
I thought the point of RPi s easy connectivity to spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio with a powerful(1) filesystem and network stack behind it. What easy way to give a NUC spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio?
I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.
This is already the setup, the foundation owns the trading company and it is the trading company going to IPO.
From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:
> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.
> I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.
Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever, instead of functioning on their mission and doing what’s right. This may mean moving manufacturing to China, using lower cost components, etc etc.
I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
Does it feel like this was inevitable anyway? I had heard that the company was already focusing on OEMs and delivering their products to those companies first. Whereas in the early days the RPi company was positioning themselves as having an educational focus (and the hobbyists). I don't know how true this is, but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.
> but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.
RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.
During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.
What's the warning at the start all about? Aren't they violating their own terms by serving it publicly on the internet?
> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.
Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.
I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.
I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi.
The practical purposes for an RPi have diminished. They're still good for when you need something small, light or low power. But the market for refurb mini-PCs really replaces most of the instances where you're just looking for a cheap, but semi-powerful, computer.
And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
A Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad).
If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.
If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.
But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)
Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.
---
For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)
Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
There are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too":
IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.
It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).
Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.
Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
One thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.
Currently running virtual machines:
* Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave
* Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit)
* Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
I use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.
Similar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.
I run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.
Absolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience.
Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
I wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.
They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
Arm listing in the US was apparently quite a blow to the London Stock Exchange. What kind of decisions drive a company to choose one exchange over another?
I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.
Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.
If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.
My visceral reaction to this was “well shit, RPi was supposed to be a non profit to lower the costs of computers, and now they’re going to be another boring computer company”, and that makes me sad. I know that Rapsberry Pi has been a dual for-profit and non-profit for quite awhile, so in theory nothing really changes, but it feels a bit weird.
However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?
Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.
That would be cool. I would like to follow their journey. Their numbers, their earning calls etc.
I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.
Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?
It seems I lost my faith in Raspberry Pis a lot sooner than most people. I gave up on them around the RPi3 days because it stopped working with the random chargers I had just laying around my house. I traced the issue back to my power supply having too much voltage ripple, with it still being within the spec for USB. Essentially, I needed to run it with their charger which was built to work better than industry standard.
This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.
[+] [-] ein0p|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] margalabargala|1 year ago|reply
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...
Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.
[+] [-] mbesto|1 year ago|reply
No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.
Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.
If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
[+] [-] GuB-42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chillingeffect|1 year ago|reply
(1) esp-idf is not in the same league as linux.
[+] [-] knowaveragejoe|1 year ago|reply
Is the cheapest Intel system as power sipping as the Pi's?
[+] [-] notanormalnerd|1 year ago|reply
This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.
[+] [-] gchadwick|1 year ago|reply
From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:
> The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.
[+] [-] Latty|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] torlok|1 year ago|reply
I know this is kind of a standard in tech, but it still eludes me where the value of the stock is.
[+] [-] michaelt|1 year ago|reply
Ah yes, the OpenAI approach :)
[+] [-] szundi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aromasin|1 year ago|reply
Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.
It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.
[+] [-] lrvick|1 year ago|reply
The mission was always to produce quality low cost computers for hobbyists and kids with open source software.
The moment you IPO you will have shareholders demanding you put profit before people and the users will always lose in that deal.
[+] [-] politelemon|1 year ago|reply
It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.
[+] [-] mlyle|1 year ago|reply
RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.
During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.
[+] [-] jstanley|1 year ago|reply
> THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.
[+] [-] theonealtair|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vsnf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gmiller123456|1 year ago|reply
And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
[+] [-] ssl-3|1 year ago|reply
If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.
If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.
But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)
Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.
---
For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)
Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
[+] [-] zamadatix|1 year ago|reply
IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.
It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).
Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.
Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
[+] [-] jcronenberg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nsbk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|1 year ago|reply
The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/
The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
[+] [-] lode|1 year ago|reply
Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
[+] [-] rocky1138|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dotnet00|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] graphe|1 year ago|reply
Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
[+] [-] borbtactics|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pzo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LtWorf|1 year ago|reply
They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
[+] [-] k8sToGo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tetris11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] snvzz|1 year ago|reply
No ECC memory, thus no.
[+] [-] MarkusWandel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nullify88|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] buildbuildbuild|1 year ago|reply
Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.
If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.
[+] [-] nottorp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?
Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.
[+] [-] revscat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5959|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ArtTimeInvestor|1 year ago|reply
I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.
Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?
[+] [-] nsteel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rpmisms|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blastersyndrome|1 year ago|reply
This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.