[dustyventure]

I think the original Broadcom chips were overstock in the normal market because they were somewhat a nuisance of unnecessary checkboxes that would reward you with further testing/diagnostic complications in return for paying too much..

[KennyBlanken]

They were overstock because they were underpowered, overpriced garbage targeting the set-top market and those manufacturers weren't interested.

Ebon Upton started Raspberry Pi to help Qualcomm dump stock they couldn't get rid of otherwise.

Look at every single Pi to come out - it's been faster than what came before it, but in a matter of weeks half a dozen competitors have better boards with faster processors for cheaper - that don't have all the nonsense like RPi foundation repeatedly fucking up the power supply so vendors could milk people on "pi compatible" USB power bricks.

A Pi 5 16GB costs $120. Plus case ($10) plus power supply ($12) plus video adapter ($10)...$152. That is absurd.

[kllrnohj]

A huge chunk of the value of an RPI is the ecosystem & support. The actual hardware in & of itself is consistently mediocre to poor for the price these days.

I think RPI is starting to lose sight of that with the Pi 5 and especially the 16gb models. It's starting to just be expensive and the better support for an ARM SBC starts losing a lot of value when it's butting up against x86 mini-pcs like the large number of N100-based options at around the $150 price point[1]. They aren't really any less efficient, and x86 software support is still consistently better than ARM software support.

1: eg https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Intel-N100-Computer-Desktop-D... - $170 for a complete unit w/ 16GB RAM & 500GB SSD.

[dustyventure]

It's funny that people were once proud of the pragmatic origin story and now apparently ashamed.

[undersuit]

Cool, I was going to research what a 16GB ram OrangePi would cost but their website is down for me.