[turtlebits]

The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability/consistency, not the price.

The hardware is known and well documented has the best OS support.

If I have issues, I can just move the SD card to another one, or just reflash another SD with 0 downtime or fuss.

[apetresc]

Sure, but the reason it generated that ecosystem was because of the price. I remember when the first Pi's were being marketed, and "the $30 computer" was absolutely the main selling point being pushed.

[LeafItAlone]

I think both are true.

The low price point got me into them over a decade ago. The ecosystem is why I prefer them even at their top spec lines.

Even at their current prices, the 8GB versions are inexpensive enough to grab instead of a 4GB one, even if there is no initial need.

And I don’t have to deal with the process of buying second hand, maybe will work, maybe won’t, items.

[mike_d]

> The main advantage of the Pi is the ecosystem and availability

Availability is a big oof. We learned over the past few years that you shouldn't build anything of any importance on top of RPi because when manufacturing crunches hit "hobbyist" products are first to be sidelined.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I don't think that's a very helpful takeaway from the situation.

Early in my career as an EE, I learned that your world could suddenly be upset and swaths of components could suddenly become unavailable to the small manufacturer because an auto company or some other massive customer got preference, so the majority of parts went "on allocation." Meaning that the production runs were allocated to certain customers and if you were lucky then you got the leftovers. You could suddenly not be able to built product for a year because critical parts just couldn't be found on the market. I remember one vendor selling a part that normally cost around $16 for over $400.

It's not specific to the Pi: this happens everywhere.