You can buy whatever else you want, even cheaper and better today, and after three years, getting a modern supported OS will be a total pain, due to binary blobs, custom drivers, custom "design solutions" etc.
RaspberryPi is currently the only SBC where you can take any revision of it and still get fully working(! yes, even wifi, bluetooth, etc.) software for it, even if it's not the newest and the greatest model.
It's my understanding that https://www.armbian.com/ has quite broad hardware support, and there are boards from Orange Pi and Pine64 that boast actual mainline kernel support, so this is more a case of a fragmented ecosystem than there being zero competitors that can meet or exceed pis.
SoC support for Rockchip/Allwinner is usually good, except for the newest SoC, where the support may be lacking in some aspects that may or may not matter to whatever usecase at hand.
Checking the board DT before buying is a good idea, to see what's supported.
I have about 8 differnt Orange/Xunlong and Pine64 SBCs, running for between 7-3 years with continuous mainline Linux updates.
Orange PI 5 Plus is faster (10% faster single threaded, 200% faster multicore per Geekbench) and also supports up to 32GB of memory. It has decent support, but not anything like the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. So if you want a SBC that is fast for special well defined projects, go with Orange PI 5 Plus, but if you want one for arbitrary hobby projects with tons of support everywhere, go with the Raspberry Pi series.
I have both two OPi5's and an OPi5 Plus, and honestly? It's not a problem. Armbian support's there and is emphatically Good Enough for the 90%+ case. They're excellent boards.
If you want to talk about bad support, let's talk about something like the NanoPi R5 series. Oof.
The big current issue that prevents me from using my boards is lack of GPU drivers. Armbian has instructions on how to use the panfork fork, but even those are not good. The panfrost team definitely do good work, so I have high hopes for future drivers. Especially with desktop OpenGL support that the rPis never got.
So I do have a rPi 5 ordered because they've advertised full upstreamed mesa Vulkan support on release. Maybe desktop OpenGL via Zink on top of Vulkan will be good enough.
The vendor OS is clunky and weird, Armbian doesn't have support (for the R5C at least), it doesn't have NVMe support (only a wireless m.2), flashing the eMMC is really weird...I wouldn't buy another NanoPi. I quite like the Orange Pi 5's for RK3588 boards though.
I have an ordinary Orange Pi 5 for my HomeAssistant setup and it's quite alright. Having a real NVME SSD in there instead of an SD card gives me peace of mind. I did some tests with zstd and found it about 50% the speed of my Threadripper (restricted to 8 cores for the test). The non-efficiency cores are therefore probably more than twice as fast as a 2 generation old AMD chip, which is pretty impressive.
For the cost of the Orange Pi 5 Plus, you're starting to get into similarly-equipped Intel N100-based machines. I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the two, but I'd assume it's faster. So you might want to look at those. (Amazon is expensive; everyone gets these from AliExpress. I also don't know how well modern Intel machines do booting without a keyboard and a mouse; the ARM SBCs do great.)
Well amazon.com doesn't help me much, although they can handle customs to europe for me (it's more trouble dealing with customs than the actual VAT value).
As for Intel machines, most i've found lately seem to be oriented towards home theater, a lot of useless (to me) video outputs and never enough network cards.
Not sure how low power they are either. This is the Intel that seems to have stopped caring about power consumption completely to win the speed race, and people are buying so why would thy care?
Right now I'm still using a dual core Atom Dsomething from I don't remember when, its main quality is it eats 15 W including 2 spinny discs (2.5" 5400 rpm). An Orange Pi with a ssd and the GPU turned off might eat even less.
They are available for pre-order via the official Orange Pi store on AliExpress right now, slated to ship in November. I know since I was about to pull the trigger on this one:
Technically yes but in most cases you dont need an sbc. An old Lenovo Thinkcentre or Dell OptiPlex Micro can end up being cheaper by the time you add all the additional expenses onto the pi (storage, power, case, etc). The micropc's are also infinately better performing and are upgradable.
How much does a Raspberry Pi 4/5 use with some sort of external storage running? How much does one cost once you factor in a case, cooling, storage, and a power supply?
I paid $195 NEW for a Beelink S12 Mini with 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, and an Intel N95 CPU
I believe it is said to idle at about 8W. It's a powerful enough machine you could run a bunch of small VMs on it, assuming your workload didn't involve GPIO or other hardware things.
I rolled a handful of RPis into VMs on one Orange Pi 5 because it has memory to do so and I wasn't using anything Pi specific.
Yeah I'm not referring to new ones. Ebay. Dirt cheap and even the ones several generations old are very power efficient and vastly outperform the pi on both performance and cost.
Yes, I'd say that - RPi is, through its moat, the only player in town where you as an user (hobbyist, corporate, ODM) can be assured that there's reasonable build quality, availability of parts, and especially the tooling around it.
A lot of the small/mini/micro form-factor systems (even ~five year old used corporate machines) are almost always the (significantly) better option at the price point. I bought a used Dell SFF system a couple of weeks ago for $119 that runs circles around the Pi in every way (16GB RAM, NVMe, real I/O, real USB, PCIe, six core i5, etc) while idling at 9 watts, which makes little difference in operating cost even in locales with the most expensive electricity in the world - especially as the Pi continues to be more power hungry and often requires a fan. The SFF system is even upgradable to 64GB of DDR4 and has a full length x16 PCIe slot and an additional x4 slot.
This machine does everything in my house, even functioning as a 2.5gb router which is already something the Raspberry Pi could never do. Add on a dozen docker containers, a VM or two, and the gap only widens. I did upgrade the RAM for $40 but the systems it replaced more than make it come out ahead on power and cost. You can still resell a Pi 4 for ~$70.
Perhaps most important - availability. There is no shortage of these systems on eBay and elsewhere (or new), there never has been and there likely never will be.
For many years the Raspberry Pi was a good default "go-to" for many applications but x86_64 has come a long way and at this point I struggle to come up with all but a few bespoke use cases for the Raspberry Pi.
When I was living in Israel, I was never able to find reasonably priced older 2nd hand x86s; there is no eBay culture, and somehow when companies have an upgrade cycle and retire a lot of old hardware, it is always to middle men who then ask for ridiculous prices (like 70% of price of new, faster, more efficient, cooler machine).
I wonder if that’s unique to Israel, or if the ease of getting reasonable 2nd hand hardware is unique to the US.
Big advantage of Raspberry Pi is that they are available everywhere for similar price. At least now that the shortage has ended. They have resellers all over the world which means can shop in local language.
My guess is that most of used PCs come from the US. A lot of companies have refresh cycles where buy new hardware every five years or so. There are a lot of support employees that get cheap mini PCs.
- many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
- rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
- yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
I do my development works on my iPad connecting to a remote VPS. And I always has a rpi zero 2 as my backup when I have no internet connection. You just connect ipad to zero2 using a usb-c to usb-c cable with a usb-c to micro usb adapter, then you can mosh from ipad to zero2 and keep programming. How wonderful!
This is certainly one of the "bespoke applications" I was referencing. That said, I tend to feel that USB GPIO boards[0] are more capable and flexible when/if you need GPIO. There's also the ESP32 series which almost always make more sense for me at least. You can add as many of these as you want to meet any GPIO need you will ever have. In almost every case I've needed GPIO having it available over wifi vs being limited to a few inches from a Raspberry Pi has been tremendously more useful.
> - many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop
Fair enough, but how often does this really matter? I'm not advocating for unnecessary burning of the planet but as an example at $0.20 per kWh a seven watt delta comes down to $1/mo which (to me, at least) is nothing over the lifetime of the hardware when factoring in the dramatically improved capability.
> - rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).
Another bespoke application that is perfectly fair. This can also be achieved with a tiny travel router (I LOVE mine) which will also run circles around gadget mode in terms of performance and functionality - significantly better Wifi, multiple real ethernet ports, it's own USB host for whatever. Running OpenWRT of course so it's still a Linux machine you can do whatever with - including connecting the USB GPIO boards I referenced above.
> - yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.
MicroSD is EXTREMELY slow and unreliable when compared to NVMe, microsd is cheap but you "get what you pay for". You can also achieve similar cost, swap-ability, and ease of overall use with USB flash drives which are often higher performance and more reliable anyway. A full EFI BIOS, bootloader, etc comes in very handy.
These are generally excellent points but the vast majority of Raspberry Pi use cases seem to be people looking for a linux machine/home server/etc that doesn't touch any of this functionality.
It's a fair point but I guess I can't wrap my head around it. Within a square foot you get at least 10x the capability and expansion of a Pi.I'm probably limited by my own perspective and bias but I can't understand someone not being able to find a square foot for a device that can replace any number of things, in my case even my router. Inch for inch they can't be matched but I suppose if you really only have a few inches a Pi is your best bet. I'm just glad I'm not in that situation.
I did reference the "mini/micro" variants which are significantly smaller - with the sacrifice being loss of PCIe which when it comes to x16 + x4 slots there really isn't any way to get around. Mine can also take two 2.5" SATA drives depending on how you feel about that.
Yeah. Just go with x86. If you like adventures go with the Raspberry Pi. If all you need is the cheapest CPU, then enjoy messing around with obsolete kernels I guess.
There are so many subtly different smallish x86 systems though that finding one that's cheap, power-efficient, fast, extensible, reasonably quiet and well supported on Linux is pretty difficult. At least to me.
I have a bunch of these systems from the past few years related to my work building self-hosted decentralized systems. Most recent is this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVLS7ZHP and so far it's working well. I'm running Ubuntu 22 and I have the stock internal SSD plus an externally attached 2T M.2 NVMe drive (via USB3.2 and this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RVC6F9Y).
> If you aren't buying a thousand of them, how much does "price point" really matter to you?
A lot of recreational tinkerers are already giving up their free time, and accepting a slightly inferior product to the commercial options. To also spend more would be a step too far :)
Getting my 20-year-old mono laser printer network-enabled with $20 of hardware: Smart, e-waste-reducing move, even if it only supports 300dpi.
Doing the same thing with $100 of hardware: Why waste the time, when a brand new mono laser would cost less, offer better print quality, and have built in wifi?
Setting up a DIY networked camera with $50 of hardware: Fun little hobby project, maybe more secure than the sketchy cloud options and cheap imports that never get firmware updates.
Doing the same thing with $130 of hardware: Just buy from Axis or Pelco or whoever. They'll have figured out the waterproofing, and the night vision, and the PoE, and nobody will call you a dumbass for buying the "wRoNg tYpE oF mIcRoSdcArD"
Is there some missing context here, like "...and they only have ten dollars to spend on hobbies during the entirety of 2023 due to the famine wracking their homeland?"
I mean, when you're talking about things (items in your "finite hobby budget") that cost less than a hundred dollars, why are you going to fuss about the "price point?" I am intrigued by how much this appears to matter to people who comment on Raspberry Pi threads.
Hobbyists spent, at times, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on microcomputers in the eighties, and that was real money back then. Even the quaint ZX whatevers that were sold in Europe were, in inflation-adjusted terms, much more expensive than a Pi. Perhaps that's why I find these recurring concerns about how much an inexpensive SBC costs to be a bit baffling, particularly in the case of a hobbiest who is only buying one of them.
Some people really don't have a lot of disposable income. Are you saying we should just stop thinking about making products accessible to those people? You seem to think that these rich "hobbyists" make up the entire population, but I'd bet there were at least ten families in the US who couldn't afford a computer for every "hobbyist" that bought one. What a bunch of elitist gate-keeping nonsense.
These low-cost SBCs are often viewed as a gateway product for introducing people to technology they wouldn't otherwise have access to - a system that could be a serviceable PC or launchpad for hobby electronics. The hobbyists you mention, apparently flush with cash and not a care in the world, aren't the people who need the price break. It's low income families with kids that need access to resources that might lead to a better future.
Not to mention that a Raspberry Pi is an embeddable system. It might be a small part of a much larger project, so even a low price might be hard to justify.
But no, let's keep making everything expensive so that computers and technology careers are only accessible to families that already have wealth. We, the Hobbyists of lore, can strut about the city square in our wearable devices and augmented reality headsets while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...
> while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...
While you've misunderstood my comment so badly I am worried you might have suffered a recent head injury, and I'm not getting any closer to understanding the quirkiness of people who comment on Raspberry Pi related threads which is what I was really shooting for, believe me: I respect the effort here.
This is such an out of touch comment. Not every, definitely not a majority, hobbyist spend thousands of dollars on their hobby. You sound like a rich kid who doesn’t understand $8 milk is expensive.
No one is suggesting people ought to spend thousands of dollars on their hobby. The point is that the difference between an $80 computer and a $120 computer (for example) is not going to break any hobbiest in 2023. I'm trying to figure out why anyone wants to pretend that that kind of difference is a big deal, and why it always manifests in Raspberry Pi conversations. It's weird.
If you're a child not earning your own money, price point matters enormously. I remember rarely ordering electronic components from Maplin because of the P&P charge which was massive compared to my pocket money.
So my missing context as to why people obsess over price differences on the order of $20 when talking about single-board computers in Raspberry Pi-related comment threads is... they're thinking of the children?
Inexpensive isn't a fixed value. A hobbyist can be someone able to splurge thousands on tech because they find it fun, but they may as well just be someone who only has 50€ at the end of the month and wants to tinker with a microcomputer they read about online.
As a software guy I make far more than average. Yet in this past year I have looked at and rejected buying for my hobbies many $$$ worth of toys because I cannot afford it. Well I could, but my family vacation took priority (this could be considered part of the hobby budget). Most years the total cost of things I want for my hobbies exceeds my annual pre-tax income, but this year made an effort to not look and I still came close.
At least as someone who makes a lot of money I have plenty of good food and a dry roof over my head. However that doesn't mean I have infinite money in the hobby budget.
I dunno, as a kid if there was a $40 or a $80 thing, I would get the $40 one (both would involve negotiating with parents anyways, and there's an obvious big gap here).
$40 is a lot of money for teens without income (which is the case for most teenagers across the world outside of the US). Most kids get money maybe once or twice a year and have to spread it out, and then negotiate for other hobby-based purchases when they can. There's a reason forums are filled with people discussing how to maintain sub-$100 Thinkpads!
> I mean, when you're talking about things (items in your "finite hobby budget") that cost less than a hundred dollars, why are you going to fuss about the "price point?" I am intrigued by how much this appears to matter to people who comment on Raspberry Pi threads.
Usually an SBC is just one item on a project's part list. If I can get one that's equally suitable and 20 Euro less, that's another bunch of sensors, or another smart light, or a few additional PCBs, or a spool of filament, or another display, or other peripheral, or another filter for my photography kit.
> Is there some missing context here, like "...and they only have ten dollars to spend on hobbies during the entirety of 2023 due to the famine wracking their homeland?"
People in that kind of situation will probably not be looking at a Pi 5 for a hobby project. A lot of people are better off than that and still not in a place where a hundred dollars here and there isn't even worth thinking about. I try to limit hobby expenses because that allows me to have more projects and play with more things without cutting into anything more important.
> Hobbyists spent, at times, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on microcomputers in the eighties, and that was real money back then. Even the quaint ZX whatevers that were sold in Europe were, in inflation-adjusted terms, much more expensive than a Pi.
At least for the things I do, that's a wildly inaccurate comparison. A Pi is more like a drop-in part like an electrical component would have been back in the 80s, and most hobbyists would not have paid thousands for a specialized diode or the like, and most wouldn't have bought another personal computer for a new project. The closest analog to a proper computer back then would be my laptop, and I did pay "real money" for that. I don't buy Pis as standalone personal computing devices, they're for automation that I can't or don't want to fit on a microcontroller. Two Pi 4s are running Home Assistant deployments, another (zero W) is driving an e-ink info screen, one Pi 3-something sits inside a half-assembled robotics kit, I had another 3-something running OctoPrint until recently. If I had to pay "real money" for any of those, I'd just do without.
All fair points, in isolation. It's the overall gestalt of the cost-related conversation surrounding the Pi that I still don't understand. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
(thanks for not mentioning that you could just buy a used PC on ebay for less, har har har)
Only very rich people can say the price point doesn't matter for them. For normal people, buying something is always a matter of balancing alternatives, not even talking about poor people for which it is even more dire
You can buy whatever else you want, even cheaper and better today, and after three years, getting a modern supported OS will be a total pain, due to binary blobs, custom drivers, custom "design solutions" etc.
RaspberryPi is currently the only SBC where you can take any revision of it and still get fully working(! yes, even wifi, bluetooth, etc.) software for it, even if it's not the newest and the greatest model.