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by michaelt 762 days ago
> the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap

Yes - and at the same time, the RPi has gotten more expensive, rising from ~$25 circa 2013 to $60-$80 for the latest RPi 5. Neither price including power supply and SD card. Of course the RPi 5 has more cores, a faster clock speed, more RAM, and built-in wifi so you do get more for your money.

Once upon a time, you were looking at $25 for a Pi and $250 for intel. These days it's more like $80 vs $180.
3 comments
ThatPlayer 762 days ago
The Raspberry Pi 4 is still good value at $35 . If your use case can be handled by a Pi 4, it's a good pick at that price range over the competitors. Most of the competitors are going to have similar i/o, but with a Rockchip RK3566 chip which is slower (unless you're using the NPU)

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is also very interesting for the size and $15 price tag. I also liked the 3A but no one remembers that one.

They're older, but everyone else is still playing catch-up, and Raspberry Pi will produce them for a while. I do hope they have a proper $35 board to upgrade to in the future.

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dvdbloc 762 days ago
Sure if you are trying to get a cheap desktop computer, the Pi always made a mediocre desktop experience. But if you need GPIO or very low power consumption or a SPI connection with a community that understands its quirks very well I doubt you are going to be happy with an old Intel desktop.
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michaelt 762 days ago
The low power, GPIO and SPI on the Pi are all trash compared to microcontrollers, most of which are also cheaper and better documented.

But if you specifically want to run Linux and have SPI and GPIO on the same chip then sure, the RPi will do that.

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chrisjj 762 days ago
OOI, why would any user care what's on the same chip?
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michaelt 762 days ago
Well, often they wouldn't.

In some cases you want to avoid your programmers needing to know two designs, compiler toolchains etc - a microcontroller might push you towards using C, and perhaps all your other code is in Python and you'd prefer to keep everything in Python.

If you're making something like a high precision time server synchronized to GPS, you might want your GPIOs to trigger direct interrupts on the device with the ethernet port. Of course, IIRC the RPi has USB ethernet so it's not a good choice for a truly high precision time server.

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mixmastamyk 762 days ago
Don't forget the 20-40% inflation over the last decade.
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