[justin66]

Someone buying used electronics on eBay has already decided that their time is worthless and the hardware doesn't need to be dependable out of the box. Which is fine, those are decisions a person could make, but it's just disingenuous to compare the value of one thing to another without taking the you are using someone's untested trash factor into account.

[aksss]

There are reasons to prefer a Pi over a used mini PC, but it is not reliability. The fact is that with Pis or PCs, _if_ you're still running after a week, you're highly, highly, likely to survive past the point of usefulness.

Reasons to prefer a pi over a mini PC - easy access to GPIO pins; small(er) form factor; power efficiency; lower weight; still cost if you can work with zeros.

Reasons to prefer a mini PC over a Pi - price to performance ratio is often far, far better; size is "good enough" for people just after a small computer (rather than an electronics project, POC, etc); you are, in fact, reducing ewaste.

In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.

The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance". That heuristic only works when comparing like for like - yesterday's mini-PC to today's mini-PC.

[cdt5050]

The biggest reasons to prefer a Pi over a mini PC: the documentation, Raspberry Pi Press, the community, the ecosystem.

Let's put it this way: you pop in your SD card, set up a username/password, a few other settings, and you end up with a system that already has Geany and Thonny installed. Go to Help -> Bookshelf and find all the issues of MagPi and Hackspace for inspiration and learning, and a couple dozen books like "Essentials - Code Music with Sonic Pi" or "Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico". Search "Raspberry Pi Hats" and get a lifetime worth of reading and learning there, hitting just about any domain you could care about.

The vision of the Raspberry Pi wasn't to create a cheap, tiny PC, it was to create a learning platform, of which the cheap, tiny PC is the basis. More than any other computing device I've seen, it really lives up to that vision.

[justin66]

> The fact is that with Pis or PCs, _if_ you're still running after a week, you're highly, highly, likely to survive past the point of usefulness.

I might be hopelessly biased since you would regard me as someone who keeps using computers when they are "past the point of uselessness," which is not a phrase I'd actually use.

A lot of the stuff I do to keep computers running after a long period of ownership does not even apply to the Pi, which is nice. I won't ever have to replace the fans on one of my Pis (the case design of the prototype Pi 5s we've seen notwithstanding), but that's a standard thing on PCs. There's maybe one capacitor on a Pi's board? I've never needed to think about it. I've guiltily thrown away and replaced soft power supplies on PCs, even though I had a friend once who knew how to fix them and I should really learn to do the same, but there's considerably less guilt when it's a USB wall wart. I've pitched a few SD cards belonging to Pis over the years (never the proper SSDs, though) but that has never been nearly as painful as a drive failure in a PC.

So I guess I'm saying I would factor in the maintenance burden.

> The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance".

I see "used electronics" and "eBay" and think of "wasted time," "frustration," "incompetence," "shamelessness," and "fraud."

The other thing I would factor in is that my time is worth something and eBay's main goal, when it comes to used electronics, is to waste it.

> In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.

I'd split the difference here and say I'd be happy to run Home Assistant on a Pi and Plex, quite possibly, on a PC (but I'd want to at least test on a Pi). I'd be happy to buy a new PC for the purpose from a trusted retailer, or build it myself.

[ThrowawayR2]

That's just silliness. The Raspberry Pi 4 / 5 are made with sub-$60 dollars worth of materials when brand new. You get what you pay for, which is not much and certainly doesn't include dependability. It's a hobbyist and educational plaything whose top design priority is to be low cost.

Little 1-liter office PCs from HP/Dell/etc. have MSRP closer to $1000 when new, meaning a correspondingly larger BOM cost, and are built to last until obsolete by PC OEMs who have years of experience doing that. Even well used units have better prospects for durability and longevity than new Raspberry Pi boards.

[justin66]

I get that you were trying to be edgy, but you landed on goofy. You're addressing someone who owns over a dozen Pis, dating back to the original 256MB Model B. They've been quite dependable for me. It is not something I need to hypothesize about.

The idea that a machine becomes more reliable as the number of parts increases and the cost increases is an interesting one, though.

[ThrowawayR2]

I've been using RPis and secondhand mini PCs for embedded systems development and testing professionally for the past few years. I've got 3-4 dead Pis already out of a dozen or so that we have, a mixture of Zeros and 4s, which isn't exactly impressive. Meanwhile the couple dozen mini PCs, despite their age and having been bought used, have had only one failure, a RAM module which was trivial to replace. The failed Pis went into the electronics recycle bin because that's all you can do with them when the develop issues.

Sorry, I stand by my opinion that Pis are hobbyist playthings. I'm sure they were reliable for you but you probably weren't trying to do anything serious with them either.

[justin66]

What were you doing with those three boards that failed? I've got the feeling you meant total failure and we're not talking about SD card failures or broken connectors. Heavy use of GPIO?

> I'm sure they were reliable for you but you probably weren't trying to do anything serious with them either.

Of course it was serious. I was frowning the entire time.

> secondhand mini PCs for embedded systems development and testing professionally

I feel like I'm missing some key piece of context when people mention the humble dumpster origins of the PCs that keep coming up when comparisons with Pi are made. Like "we were trapped on an island the entire time," or "our company operates out of South Sudan, the poorest nation in the world," or something like that.

[Eduard]

Raspberry Pi 4s fresh out of the factory often have hardware issues themselves (HDMI connector failures, unreliable USB port power supply on reboot etc.), as one can see from the numerous (and unacknowleged) reports on Raspberry Pi forums — so I find the comparison with used hardware fair.

[wds]

I highly doubt that brand-new Raspberry Pis and used PCs on eBay have anywhere close to comparable failure rates.

[amluto]

Anecdote: my one attempt to use a Raspberry Pi PoE hat ended in almost immediate failure due to a mechanical failure of a header on the hat. (Also the built in fan is crap.)

The RPi itself is still going strong.

[justin66]

Why lie? Pis have fragile connectors and they certainly break more often during use than a brand name laptop's connectors, but they do not have a high defect rate out of the box.