[0xEF]

A lot of scorn for this latest offering from Pi, but I think perspective is important here. No, most of us here do not have a use for the Pi 500 or it's display, but in part so the world where a lightweight low-consumption device can open some doors for connectivity and learning, this looks like a great solution.

We tend to forget that not everyone on the planet has the same resources or needs we do.

[Cumpiler69]

>but in part so the world where a lightweight low-consumption device can open some doors for connectivity and learning, this looks like a great solution

I hear this repeated over and over again in RPi threads, but nobody ever provides any proof of developing nations using RPis as affordable desktop computers apart from some PR articles every now and then involving partnerships and donations.

This feels more of an opinionated viewpoint or stereotype from clueless westerners from rich countries they have on developing countries. $50+ for a RPi might be affordable computer for you when your average computer at home is $700+, but for people in developing countries even $50 is A LOT of money and they're not gonna spend it buying RPis.

As someone originally from a developing nation, most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper (nearly free) and more abundant than a new RPI 5 based computer, not to mention more versatile in what SW they can run.

Or, more recently people started using old Android phones to learn on because they're also cheap and abundant and can be used for coding/tinkering. But RPis, not so much.

The OLPC project intended to provide cheap computers to developing countries also failed in part because, just like a RPI as a computer, westerners don't understand the market of developing countries and do product development from their own privileged perspective.

This isn't meant to denigrate anyone's work or effort, just wanted to share the reality in the field that I encountered.

Oh and BTW, even in the rich west where I live now, a RPi5 is pretty expresive and impractical for a general purpose computer when you can find Core i5 laptops with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs for that money on the used market. And it comes with display and battery to boot and can be used on the go.

[whywhywhywhy]

It's because in reality it just doesn't work that way, the reality of what education really needs is ways to collaborate on documents and sync those back to teachers, ways to broadcast or watch recordings of lessons and most of all reliability and control. In reality these needs are better served by Chromebooks or Android tablets. The fact that the Pi is a real computer and runs the real version of Python on a real OS while meaning a lot to the "maker movement" and hoddyist hackers it means nothing in the reality of teaching a child how code works which would probably be done more successfully in a web app and a web based Python interpreter or the wider reality of using a computer for work outside of code (most of the curriculum).

Personally I wish the world was different and those things mattered but in the reality of education it doesn't and as time goes on it feels more and more like the education manifesto of Pi feels opposite of reality. Take this like from their release:

"during the early days of the COVID pandemic, when we worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver thousands of Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kits and monitors to young people studying from home in the UK"

Like what use would that have been? The systems can't run Zoom, not powerful enough to handle Google Meet, they can't handle videostreams competently enough for a conference, they don't have a microphone, don't have a camera like how would this have helped anyone learn during COVID when the main requirement was video conferencing.

[Cumpiler69]

>Like what use would that have been?

Advertising, PR, virtue signaling and maybe getting some kids into some embedded linux development who will then grow up and use the Pi in commercial products at work.

Win on all fronts for the RPi corpora-, sorry I meant foundation.

[naikrovek]

You have a very myopic view, intentionally or not.

[Cumpiler69]

Maybe you can detail and clarify my view on why you think that is?

[ajb]

Yeah that quote is a bit nuts.

The reality is that the pi isn't a general educational product - it's a computing educational product. And that is fine. If a kid wants to learn about programming, about what goes on under the hood, it's a fine addition to their locked down school Chromebook.

[Cumpiler69]

>about what goes on under the hood

But you can do that on a regular laptop/computer running Linux sine that's what RPi also runs. You don't need an additional RPi to learn what's under the hood of a device running Linux.

[cdt5050]

And that gets really, really complicated when you have 1 teacher and 200 students to teach that week, each with a different hardware configuration, differing skill levels, devices in various states of repair, etc.

RPi is pretty much the cheapest way to get a brand new, standardized device into the hands of each of 200 students, then give the same curriculum to each student that will work the same, with predictable errors the teacher is going to be more ready to troubleshoot, instead of trying to figure out why some kid's PC segfaults because of an error on a Broadcom device that was only available on devices manufactured in May of 2014 (but sold in September of 2017, the ones manufactured 05/2014 but sold before 9/2017 are perfectly fine) when he tries to use any function using sin in Python (but the libc one works just fine).

Schools have historically paid a premium for this, like the Basic Stamp, which was really just a PIC microcontroller preflashed with some other stuff on the PCB to help it run, and sold at a crazy markup, but was well integrated into a standard curriculum that gave every student the same starting point and something that a teacher could easily help hundreds of students with. It's also kind of why Arduino became so popular -- did the same thing, but a fraction of the cost.

[ajb]

One good reason is that you can try stuff that would screw your laptop. Whereas with a pi it's just flashing the card again.

I used to work for a company that sold pi kits for schools, you could let 7-9 year olds try stuff that teachers and parents would not let them do to a laptop. Totally breaking a computer and fixing it again is a great experience, but not one you want to have on your primary machine

[alxlaz]

Yeah, I'm going to second that. I've lived in (technically I am from what used to be a "developing nation" at the time), worked in, and worked with people from, "developing nations", both in education and industry. It's just not how things work.

The Pi is a good educational platform for e.g. Western organizations that need to kickstart education programs at a scale. It's infinitely easier to ship 100 Pis than to locally source 100 similar computers and set them up. And it's as good a platform for introducing people to computers as any, I guess. But it's not the kind of platform that gets "grassroots" adoption.

First off, if you live in a developing country, you want access to technology with wide-scale application (and the opportunities it brings). Realistically, what you want is something that runs Windows 11 or (dare dream...) macOS, that you can use to write mobile apps and games, web apps that target interesting and "hot" technologies and markets, learn system administration for contemporary platforms and so on. That alone kind of excludes anything that's not x86 or a Mac.

Hipster platforms for retrogaming and "radical simplicity" is something that engineering professionals in well-off countries can afford to do as a hobby. But if you're learning programming in the hope that it will be a development opportunity (for yourself and your family, or for your country, no matter what form it takes, whether you want to emmigrate or stay and develop your local industry) you want to learn things with real industrial relevance. The few Pis I've seen used in a scenario like these were almost exclusively embedded devices, largely because the Pi is an easily-available embedded platform, making it easy to outsource development for it.

But other than that? No, once you factor in shipping, currency conversion and all the accessories you need, a Pi is about as expensive as a hand-me-down laptop that can run a lot more software, with a lot less hassle, and isn't a fire hazard you have to be careful around with and/or fit into a makeshift case (because, if you have to scrounge money for a 50 USD Pi, even a 10 USD case is going to be kind of expensive).

[mark_l_watson]

I would add Chromebooks to your list of Windows and macOS computers. Chromebooks support video calls, are versatile, and offer a ‘good enough’ Linux system for educational use and light weight programming.

I use a $9000 macOS setup in my home office (stuffed Mac Mini and Apple’s very nice studio monitor). As a backup I have an older, but still very nice System 76 Linux laptop. I joke to my wife that everything I need to do, I can also do on my less than three hundred dollar three year old Lenovo Duet Chromebook - just not as efficiently. I had a friend who was a software developer for the Apache Foundation, paid well by IBM, and he only used a tiny NetBook laptop, little keyboard, tiny monitor, and he argued that using minimal hardware removed distractions.

[naikrovek]

> nobody ever provides any proof of developing nations using RPis as affordable desktop computers

Just because they're not widely used for that now doesn't make them unsuitable for that. They're an option, and options are good.

[lukeck]

This is a really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

In your opinion, what would a product that successfully provides low cost computing in developing markets look like? Is one even needed?

[cdt5050]

Nah, the lack of hardware is a real problem in developing countries, and is something that OLPC and Raspberry Pi are well suited to solve. But hardware is the easy part -- the much harder part of the problem to solve is the lack of human capital in computing education, and that's the part of the equation OLPC missed.

For example, they sent hundreds of thousands of laptops to Uruguay, but they hardly got used for education because the teachers just simply didn't know how to use them or integrate them into the curriculum. But Uruguay continued the OLPC model under the Ceibal project, and it's only just now, ~15 years later, after teacher training regarding technology is far more widespread and teachers have far more experience in utilizing computers in the classroom, that it's starting to show effectiveness. And the OLPC model is considered a success in Uruguay, but it took over a decade of persistence to work itself out.

So this is actually something that RPi is tackling head on -- the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually working hard to develop curriculums meant to address challenges in developing countries, like poor internet connectivity (which means a curriculum designed to be self-sufficient), and then also putting a lot of effort into training educators. This is before they even try sending Raspberry Pi's out, and largely is designed around using the already limited computing devices they have (not RPis) because a lot of those governments are unwilling to invest in computer education (because they have bigger problems to worry about and consider things like every student having a computer to be a luxury when nutrition is a more pressing matter on the quality of education).

Frankly, even the idea of "most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper" is a fair bit of a luxury and lacking understanding of the challenges of computing education in developing countries once you leave the cities and start looking at rural populations. In Mexico, nationally, 45% of households have a computer and 56% have an internet connection. Once you go to rural areas, that's ~20%. And that's before you consider socioeconomic status and the disparity in access to computers and internet. Some stats put the lower-income Mexicans at 5% computer ownership nationally.

In Rural Mexico, it's normal for a computer lab of 30-50 computers to serve a school of 500-1,000 students, or for schools to have NO computers and instead send students to nearby schools occasionally to utilize their larger computer labs for learning computer skills, and that's the only computer access they realistically have. This is really a great use case for RPi's, but like I said -- the hardware is the easy part to solve. The fact of the matter is if you sent a crate of RPi's or any other computer to these schools, they'd sit in the boxes for years because they don't have the infrastructure or the human resources to start using them. And that's actually the part that RPi Foundation is focusing on first.

[aa-jv]

>We tend to forget that not everyone on the planet has the same resources or needs we do.

True, but we must also admit that misguided prejudices about resources can lead people to miss out on some very significant opportunities, as well.

By way of anecdotal example: I have a Pi 400 on my desk that I have used as a Linux development workstation for the past couple of years - in which it has performed superlatively, I might add. Its small and light and fast enough, yet works as a perfectly good performance metric/measurement for the projects I've thrown at it.

I used it to develop a scientific instrumentation and sampling product which has gone on to produce >$40million in revenue for the customer. I've used it to develop audio capture tools which have been integrated into the r&d facilities at a major audio hardware vendor.

So, even though it might seem 'underpowered' and 'un-sexy' for most such tasks, this particular embedded developer has been able to squeeze much value out of the limits of the hardware. Not only is it a good performance reference, but it has just enough oomph to allow me to avoid using cross-compiler techniques, and in that sense is a gateway device to so many very powerful embedded Linux development tools and methods.

[thiht]

I would have absolutely loved getting this as my first personal computer. The form factor is so cool, and even living in a first world country, that price tag is incredible.

I really don't understand most of the comments, who cares if it just has micro hdmi ports, no nvme (whatever it is, I don't think I would care if I was 16, and I don't think I care today either) or whatever you think is missing? It costs less than $100 and runs Linux!

[dagw]

16 year old me, back when I was 16, would also have found this amazing. The thing is that today, lots of things cost less than $100 and runs linux. Go on Ebay or Facebook marketplace, and you'll find a near unlimited supply of $100 laptops that will run Linux at least as well as this will, and there you even get a screen. Go to AliExpress and you'll find mini PCs with similar specs to this for around $100, and you'll get an x86 CPU and the option of also running Windows. There is lots of competition in the "costs less than $100 and runs Linux" market, and it is not clear why this is necessarily better.

who cares if it just has micro hdmi ports, no nvme

Clearly lots of people. Choosing to need a special 'weird' cable, that very few people have lying around, to plug it into a monitor or choosing the storage option with the much worse IO performance and reliability just seem like strange choices, given that making the 'right' choice probably wouldn't increase the cost by all that much.

[cdt5050]

The Raspberry Pi has three huge advantages over those other options:

1) GPIO, letting you do things like learning to flash LEDs or controlling robotic arms and getting ready to use a Pi Zero for robots or such.

2) Cool add-ons, like the Pi Camera or AI modules, and a product family such as compute modules, Pi Zero, etc. A strong third party market of Hats, etc.

3) SUPPORT. Pi 500 is available as part of a kit with the official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, which I know from experience in teaching people interested in learning this kind of stuff, is a really awesome getting started resource. But it doesn't stop there -- Raspberry Pi Press has a lot of freely available books that teach various topics, AND a monthly magazine to teach and inspire. Not to mention countless tutorials meant specifically for Pi and Pi OS.

This is really, really awesome.

Those ebay specials aren't going to satisfy any of these. And while direct RPi competitors do provide a response to the first point, they get weak on the second point, the RPi is pretty unique in the third point.

[cben]

Radxa X4 board specifically has x86 N100, an M.2 slot (a short one) and GPIO (though you need to flash the on-board RP2040 to access them? haven't tried yet). I'm quite happy with it as a cheap desktop. Documentation is pretty OK? Nowhere like the tutorials ecosystem around RPi but Radxa are certainly trying to provide detailed info.

One sweet quality of RPi this lacks was being unbrickable — the entire state was on SD card; screw up and you can just write a new card. (Recent RPis complicate that with an a boot flash). But by now I've bricked enough RPis by electrical damage — including an 400 — to not be as excited about that :-]

I do agree with your analysis. All I'm saying is if one is considering a competitor, the X4 with x86 running mainline linux might be a safer bet than most less-documented ARM boards...

[6SixTy]

Those things are cool in their own right, but most of those belong within the context of someone looking to make something or learn electronics. Not necessarily something that someone looking to use one as a fully fledged computer is going to appreciate. And the Pi 500 definitely swings in the direction of computer.

[cdt5050]

The Pi 500 does definitely swing in the direction of the computer.

IMO the target demographic of the Pi 500 are people who want, first and foremost, a desktop PC, but one that is well suited to hobbyist computing and/or computing education.

Yeah, if you JUST want to run a word processor, browser, etc. one of those N100 PC's might make more sense. If you open up an issue of MagPi magazine and feel inspired, then the Pi 500 might make more sense. And that's what it really comes down to. Is computing, itself, a hobby or interest to you, or not?

[Citizen_Lame]

Absolutely agree, but like 20 years ago.

[gchadwick]

I do find HN threads about R-Pi products weigh heavily negative. Yet despite the apparent many major issues that keep getting pointed out R-Pi seems to keep going from strength to strength. Maybe they understand their own customers and their market better than commenters here?

[sho_hn]

I have mixed feelings about their products :-)

I use them quite a lot for various projects (mosty recently in my e-piano build, where the Pi 5 performs admirably pulling off low-latency audio for my piano VSTs - https://eikehein.com/piano), but while I vibe with the whole "sets a known standard, just works, network effects" advantages, there's some real annoyances that run counter to that.

For example, I'd expect the standard SBC from the Good Ones to have great upstream support, but it turns out a vanilla kernel doesn't support the Pi 5 until perhaps 6.13 due to lacklustre upstreaming efforts, meaning most alternative distros to the patched-up Raspberry Pi OS still don't support the Pi 5 properly. (I ended up managing to bake up a modified Fedora 41 because I wanted the much newer audio stack in said piano, but only with a lot of effort.)

And yes, the dreaded Micro HDMI ports, perhaps the weakest, shoddiest, most prone-to-failure port around ... why they'd put those on the keyboard one (the 500 linked here) is beyond me.

That said, I like a lot of the strategic choices they made with the RP1, and I suspect there will be more interesting HW from them coming down the pipe over time.

[surgical_fire]

HN crowd is solid in some very narrow technical subjects. The more you deviate from those, the worse. It quickly degenerates into some incredibly stupid takes from people that clearly think very highly of themselves, and are unable to do any introspection.

R-Pi offerings are fine. It is supposed to be a cheap computer, and they could get something that costs less than 200 bucks with a monitor. Definitely not bad.

[Ekaros]

I think the thing many are starting to feel that they are not cheap anymore.

At least compared to some things like refurb laptops and such. Just recently saw 249€ Lenovo laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U, 16GB RAM and 480GB SSD.

Not new, but still, more powerful and having storage too.

[surgical_fire]

Yes, but that is true for basically every consumer product. Cars, electronics, you name it.

"You can buy old restored/refurbished thing cheaper than a cheap brand new thing" is hardly a very insightful take.

Does that mean that there is no market for "cheap brand new thing"?

[Ekaros]

There is market for cheap new things. But this is at price point that for most people in the world it is not anymore "cheap". Around 100 is at level you kinda need to think about it. If it was half of that like Pis used to be back in time I would agree for it to be cheap.

Specially when you start adding up things. Like monitor, mouse, power. The total adds up and somehow it doesn't feel like great deal for most income levels.

Same goes for their other products. Numbers just don't make sense for lot of people.

[pizza234]

In a few months there will be second hand RPi 500's on sale, presumably in the range of 40/60 $, so that price should be used for comparison against second-hand products, not the price as new.

[wqaatwt]

There but why not get a cheaper Chromebook or similar device then. I find it extremely hard to believe that there are a lot of people who’d buy a RPi and don’t at least 1 PC already. It’s a device for enthusiasts and such.

[Citizen_Lame]

N100 box is new and cheaper. 256GB, 16GB RAM HDMI, 2.5 Gb network, case, charger etc. Raspberry Pi is pointless as a "cheap" computer. It's good if you you are building something which requires GPIO.

So perhaps you are the one out of touch.

[geerlingguy]

In some parts of the world, that box is around the same price as a similarly kitted Pi 5 (though with 8GB of RAM), but certainly not cheaper.

Nothing against the N100 as an option, it's a great option for many use cases... but it's at minimum the same price (for a different type of computer), but typically a little more expensive ($150+)

[cdt5050]

I find that communities like these are far too focused on "TECHNICALLY CORRECT". Like, yeah, there are some things that technically are faster and cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, like that ebay special or that Alibaba-only SBC that's a direct copy of orange pi, or whatever.

But when it comes to things you can't glean from spec sheets, they utterly fail. Like the most important thing: the human experience. Like when it comes to Pi competitors, nothing even comes close to the Pi in having such an ecosystem of learning resources. I personally really appreciate the MagPi magazine as it's a great source of inspiration.

[mschuster91]

> I do find HN threads about R-Pi products weigh heavily negative.

The HN audience at large is still pissed that RPi chose to prioritize large industrial accounts over hobbyists during the Covid chip shortage era, and what few stock arrived at hobbyist distribution channels quickly got mopped up and re-sold by scalpers.

A few FOSS hardliners are pissed about binary blobs and a lack of in-depth documentation - which is something I do understand, after all RPi-as-an-ecosystem should be one of the larger accounts at Broadcom, so I'd expect the negotiators to finally make some progress on that front in a decade.

And others are pissed because Broadcom messed up Pi 4's PCIe implementation [1], or the RPi-side fuck-up with USB-C resistors.

And the final general group of pissed-off people I'm aware of - which again I support - are annoyed about the situation regarding the CSI and DSI (camera and display, respectively) interfaces. Cameras still are limited to official cameras only, and there's (almost?) no DSI compatible displays which means everyone has to pay HDMI licensing fees despite not needing to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697

[musicale]

You're not wrong I think. ;-)

I too was alienated by RPi's supply and scalping situation – combined with their seeming contempt for the hobbyists, teachers, and students who had actively supported the platform.

Another unfortunate aspect is that Pi 5 has a list price of $50 vs. $35 for the 4 and earlier models (and also requires a more expensive power supply.) The price seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

[wqaatwt]

And how successful the RPi 400 was? not saying it wasn’t but I doubt it was (after all it’s mainly a device for enthusiasts/toy) compared to their other products.

> Maybe

Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not saying they don’t but do you think that’s true about every single company by default?

[pjmlp]

I personally find this great option for doing hobby ARM development on UNIX like OS, or even playing with build your own ARM OS kind of thing.

My first computer had 48 KB of memory, folks don't have any idea of how much computing is wasted nowadays in their Electron garbage.

[hashishen]

Exactly, everyone here complaining can probably build what they're looking for on their own att the end of the day