[steveBK123]

It's crazy how Raspberry Pi & Apple prices have moved in converging direction.

Pi 5 8GB is $200

MacBook Neo 8GB is $600 (probably some edu discount available) Sure 3x the price, but it comes with - 256GB SSD, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad..

So the Pi has slowly become too expensive for weird one-off projects and also price competitive with a cheap Mac by the time you add all the stuff you need to use it as a cheap computer.

If Apple ever got around to a headless "Mac Micro", below the Mini, which had the same specs as the Neo in desktop form it would be even more stark. They could easily ship that for $400 (mini is $300 cheaper than cheapest M-series MacBook with same ram/ssd). They might never do this as it's enough computer for most people they'd lose revenue from those otherwise spending far more at the Apple Store.

[pseudosavant]

Not a completely invalid or uncommon take, but also not completely correct. People lament that it isn't the $25 like it used to be with the Pi 2/3, but ignore that you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20. I've used them for a bunch of projects: moonlight game streaming client, on-stage video player controlled by a foot pedal, Bluetooth controlled recorder for USB audio interfaces, Tailscale exit node, etc. They are tiny and great!

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/

I wish a Pi 5 (and RAM in general) was cheaper, but Raspberry Pi can't control that.

[pibaker]

Some people seem to think raspberry pi is a consumer tech company and whenever a new model is released, the old one will be discontinued. They will complain about the product being changed and the company robbing them of a cheap SBC.

I can only assume they don't actually work with the pi because if you spend just a minute looking at any reseller's inventory or even just the official website you will see they still make and sell and support boards from a decade ago.

[zarzavat]

I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to understand.

If you're using the Pi as a microcontroller that you can run Python on, then just get the cheapest Pi that meets your needs.

If you're using the Pi for computationally expensive tasks then pay more money and get the fast one.

Personally I have a Pi 5 and it's perfect for me because I want small size but high performance. People say "just buy a real computer" but that would be higher energy and larger footprint.

The whole point of these things is that you use them for whatever you can imagine. Since different people have different imaginations it only makes sense that there's a range of different devices to suit everyone.

[baq]

N100-class minipcs are better at everything the pi 5 is doing except perhaps a bit of idle power and gpio.

[wao0uuno]

Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface? Can it be used to build a portable battery powered smartphone like PC (Compute Module 5)?

Raspberry Pi’s biggest strength is its form factor and low power draw.

[gruturo]

To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5.

(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)

[timschmidt]

> Can a N100-class minipc” be installed inside of a wall with a touchscreen and serve as a PoE powered Home Assistant interface?

Yes. Generally only requiring a $10 PoE splitter like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134500605396

Some N100 class machines draw more power, but many don't, and there are more capable PoE splitters for a few dollars extra.

Use a USB touchscreen.

[cuu508]

Watermelons are better at everything the apples are doing except perhaps a bit of weight and for making apple pies.

[zarzavat]

If I tried to put a mini PC where my Pi currently sits - a very narrow shelf - it would fall off and probably hurt itself. You can put a Pi just about anywhere.

[vladak]

For the microcontroller use case with Python, the alternative might be to use actual microcontroller that runs CircuitPython/MicroPython. Personally I find it a bit better due to no need to manage/update the Linux distro.

[extraduder_ire]

Everything on their website has a date they promise to manufacture them until.

They really want to assure people that they can get a near identical replacement for years to come if they want to build a product or deploy one somewhere.

[javchz]

Agree. It's clear since COVID that Pi it's barely a company for makers or DIYers anymore, but it's a supply company for small to medium industries to integrate cheap PCs in their manufacturing process and they are good at that role.

[hatthew]

Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.

[wtallis]

When people talk about whether something like a Pi is aimed at industrial customers, that is largely not a statement about the cost vs specs, nor about the level of engagement with the DIY community. It's usually about having a suitable supply chain and long-term support and stable BOM and a mature software platform for customers to start building on.

[hatthew]

Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.

[milanove]

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.

[DanielHB]

Raspberry Compute Module (basically a normal raspberry without built-in I/O) is widely used in the industry at large. What they are not meant to be is the lowest cost per CPU/GPU flops so they are mostly used in high-value-add / low-volume / gen-1 products.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia...

I personally worked on a system with raspberry compute modules 3 and 4, the total system cost was in the ~million dollar range. This was definitely a commercial product with dozens of engineers doing R&D, not a hobby project.

We were looking into smaller systems with lower profit margins (~20k USD) and for those we were considering moving away from raspberry CMs because of cost.

The main advantage of the raspberry CM ecosystem is just how widely popular it is and how cheap and available "dev boards" are (just grab a non-CM raspberry and it is almost the same thing). Most of these types of systems don't really have the I/O that makes testing and developing a lot easier.

Being popular is quite important because firmware issues are notoriously expensive to troubleshoot and fix often requiring the manufacturer help. Said manufacturer does not give a damn if you are a low-volume customer. More popular systems have more information available online and are less likely to have bugs (or at least the bugs are known).

I remember one of our other systems bluetooth module had a weird edgecase bug that caused the module to shutdown after several days of it being powered on. It took multiple engineers >1month of work to basically go "yep nothing we can do about this and manufacturer is not helping"

I know they are being used in Ukranian drones and some police-car systems in some cities (although this was hearsay from a coworker and I don't remember the city). But those are just the examples I heard of.

[voakbasda]

As an example, I believe the tear-down of one of the now-defunct electric scooter rental company’s units revealed it contained a RPi. IIRC, the commentary lambasted them for using it, because it’s not really rated for that kind of job. But a significant portion of the peanut gallery understood and rationalized the decision. I expect fewer folks would question this choice these days.

[jkrejcha]

I've seen this sentiment a bit and while I don't dispute that you can get a better SBC for cheaper, there are still a lot of issues and it tends to be around software support primarily that allows it to occupy a very sweet spot. It's a significant factor in deciding to use them. There are a lot of embedded use cases that can be solved by hooking up to an ESP32 but there are a bunch that need a little bit more than that. If you want to run a web server for example, you do have options on the ESP32 but also writing C/C++ for a web backend is both a little fraught and kinda miserable compared to Python or Go or something. I mean it's certainly doable, but it certainly isn't the first language I'd reach for. If you want to work a little bit with streaming video, same deal

So this is the embedded Linux usecase. And... the embedded Linux ecosystem seems kinda... hacked together? You a lot of the times get Yocto Linux which is its own can of worms because you tend to invariably get meta-vendor packages that patch everything from U-Boot to the kernel to random userspace utilities. There are better cases and it depends on how much the vendor works upstream. Sometimes the vendor doesn't even bother with maintaining the meta layer and it ends up getting into a "maintained mostly by one guy in Nebraska" scenario

Some other vendors seem to take U-Boot and a copy of the Ubuntu LTS sources from 10 years ago and hacked it until it was possible to get a root shell without the thing going into a kernel panic then put the resulting image on a Google Drive or FTP server somewhere but didn't go much further than that

What ends up being is that there is like a U-Boot and Linux kernel variant for either each different SBC (or sometimes vendor thereof) duck taped together. Support, even for the peripherals included, can be spotty at best, and there are many times where you have to patch the kernel or userspace to get it to work right. I've seen boards which run the weirdest stuff, ones whose kernel patches run into the megabytes with poor (if any) documentation, boards which apparently don't want to run anything but Android, etc. There are certainly vendors that work well and upstream and make everything nice and easy but they tend to be rarer and/or more expensive

Compared that with the Pis and the difference is night and day enough that the raw specs matter less. Yes RasPi has their own kernel fork, but iirc they do work a bit upstream and the versions maintained are like 6.12 and not like 5 (which I've seen). They are also relatively easy to procure where more specialized vendors tend to be... less so. Flashing them is pretty simple and if you want to create your own image you can do that as well easily without Yocto or whatever. The HAT ecosystem is a nice way to add extensibility, the headers basically allow you to do a lot of ESPy type things as well (since Linux has native specific userspace support for GPIO, I2C, SPI, PWM, LED, hwmon, etc). And so on and so forth. And it all just kinda works

This in of itself, makes it a pretty decent option for industry, especially if it's like either n <= 1000 units or a relatively small part of the BOM itself. It often is very much the economically sensible option to stick a Pi in it rather than put many man hours into fixing problems that really shouldn't require me to open up menuconfig or apply a kernel patch again.

People like Geerling tend to come at it from the hobbyist or maker side of things but it does apply to the industrial side too. Yes in many cases knowing part XYZ will still be manufactured in 30 years is more important than the dev experience or some other factor is at play (power draw being another) but in a lot of cases its not (e.g. more portable code, stuff not requiring recertification) and the Pis also do have a relatively reasonable time guarantee too. It shouldn't be a bad experience to develop on these boards! But regardless, there are a lot of times that it is, and that's why I think the RasPi continues to do as well as it does.

This is also why I think, despite the price, it continues to do well in the hobbyist community. I can hook it up using the headers to anything SPI, I2C, etc, and start making it do things with very little software trouble and regardless if I want to do it in C or if I want to do it in Python

[nubinetwork]

While you can still buy a pi 3, you'd be kicking yourself for not using something faster.

[avhception]

We have a lot of old pi3 stock at $work. We keep using them. The pi3 was the newest model when we imagined and built the applications we're using them for. It was perfectly capable back then. Why would that have changed? The application hasn't changed and it's still perfectly capable now.

[hdbebdb]

Why would you? It's completely fine for it's intended educational context

[KeplerBoy]

It's not just intended exclusively or limited to education. Many products ship with compute modules inside.

[Uncle_Brumpus]

I don't know, I've got a ~10 year old 1B+ sitting there running Pihole just fine. My ass remains un-kicked.

[mathis]

Try getting your hands on a Pi Zero 2 W. Here in Germany you cannot get them at all any more and the quoted price has gone up 3x.

[NavinF]

It's $37 new incl shipping on US eBay. Initial retail price was $23 incl shipping, see launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025579

So a 61% price hike over 5 years, of which 24% was just inflation. If the total price really went up 200% in your country, that's exceptional and probably caused by policies unique to your country.

btw you can't compare prices without shipping because there was never an option to buy 100 at $15 each and amortize shipping. Retailers treated it as a loss leader with a limit of one per purchase, often forcing you to buy some extra junk to meet the order minimum.

[justin66]

Weird. I can get one at the local Microcenter - with headers, the only one they're selling right now - for $18. They have a bunch in stock.

[geerlingguy]

Yeah, for those with a Micro Center, the Pi pricing is in line with MSRPs. A lot of people buy from vendors on Amazon or eBay, which do not have to stick to MSRPs, and they use those prices as "gospel". Sadly, for some people, those prices are the best they can find for a shipped product in their location, so I don't blame them.

[NavinF]

Can you buy out their inventory, sell them for $36 online, and help everyone save a dollar, or is this the same old "Retailers treated it as a loss leader"?

Amazon/eBay prices are indeed gospel. You can ship something like this across the country for <$5 so location doesn't matter unless you're talking tariffs

[vr46]

Yeah, more stock arriving on 1st of October, so I'm told.

[cromka]

> you can get a Pi Zero 2 W (quad A53 cores like 3B, 512MB RAM) for <$20

Except... You can't. They're sold out almost entirely and none of the distributors can tell when the new batch gets in. At least in EU.

[humanperhaps]

The Pi Zero 2W is great, but data I/O (WiFi, USB, and micro SD) do limit use cases slightly. For most use cases, I doubt this is an issue, but it is something to keep in mind if you want to run bandwidth-constrained services on it. For $15, I don't think that's an issue, but it is unfortunate.

[abdullahkhalids]

Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?

What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

[pseudosavant]

I've easily played 1080p video, but not using a full Linux GUI. The more effective way is to use a command-line video player like mpv that can leverage the hardware decoder and render to the frame buffer.

I made a project for a band to use on-stage where it would switch between videos by tapping a bluetooth foot pedal. The stompbox-style foot pedal buttons were just wired into an ESP32 acting like a bluetooth keyboard sending 1, 2, or 3. The key bindings for mpv were setup to instantly switch to specific videos for each number. It worked perfectly.

I have also used it to real-time 1080p stream my gaming PC from another room using Moonlight so that I could play in more than one location in my home. That was also running directly from the command-line.

But trying to use something like X/Wayland and proper GUI apps usually performs poorly. 512MB of RAM and the 1GHz CPU clock struggle with that.

[ssl-3]

> Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?

Yes, I think so. With strong caveats.

I used a Pi 3b as the primary video player for local media in my living room for a few years, starting a decade or so ago when that was the new hotness. The Pi Zero 2W is the same thing except with less IO and a somewhat-slower clock speed (but it can be overclocked to match the 3b).

I just put an appropriate build of Kodi on an SD card, booted it up like an appliance, pointed it at my network share, and used it.

The performance was proper for the time doing this in lets-sit-down-and-watch-a-movie mode. It was generally flawless with 1080p h.264 and lesser formats. It was not so good with h.265/HEVC, but that wasn't as common back then as it is today.

I was very pleased when I picked up a Pi 4 for this role once that came 'round. It does a very fine job with all of my 1080p media on my old dumb TV, including h.265 (which it has a hardware decoder for).

> What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

No, not in my experience. There may be an incantation that I don't know, but I have not had very good success with these devices with browser-based streaming media. They have, for me, been resolutely disappointing in this role. I blame gaps in the video driver/X11/browser stack, but I haven't ever wanted to go very deep into this particular rabbit hole.

> I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.

[drnick1]

> If you're in the States and you can tolerate the ecosystem (which is definitely not browser-based), then you might find that a $25 ONN streaming box from Wal-Mart is a better bet for this job. These run Android.

These are horrible from a privacy standpoint, and should be avoided. They are cheap for a reason.

[ssl-3]

Yeah, probably. So is the Android phone that I bought for $64 that I take with me everywhere.

My war is already lost. Reaping the spoils of assimilation is only natural.

[N1ckFG]

In my experience, yes to hardware-accelerated video from CLI--running in EGL mode, with no window manager, that RPi model works very well. (A C++ app that uses video as a texture can be surprisingly performant, too.) But no to playing video in a full desktop environment and browser, not smoothly--it's just too much overhead.

[nine_k]

An old thin client machine, like a Thinkcentre M73, would do the job, and would cost less than an RPi. Look at EBay.

[justin66]

He's talking about a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It's a $15 part.

[drnick1]

No, I don't think it will be beefy enough, since you need to be running a desktop environment essentially to do that. (Check out Plasma Bigscreen BTW.)

I used thin client seems much better for this.

[unholiness]

Zeros are just sold out everywhere through, no?

[sharperguy]

I can't find a Pi Zero 2 W for sale anywhere that will deliver to me

[theowaway]

except you can't. They have been out of stock for weeks

[HankB99]

I just checked my closest Microcenters (in Illinois.) 12 in Westmont and 25+ in Chicago (for $18) Zero W were 13 and 25+ respectively at $15.

Long gone are the days when they would sell a Pi Zero for $3.14 on Pi day.

[LastTrain]

Pi Zero 2 W is what people are saying is out of stock. MC doesn’t have any of them either.

[ssl-3]

There's more than one Pi Zero 2 W -- one with headers, and one without. Are you looking at both?

Headerless version is out-of-stock for my nearest Microcenter (Columbus, Ohio): https://www.microcenter.com/product/643085/raspberry-pi-zero...

But they say they have 25+ of the version that comes with headers: https://www.microcenter.com/product/683270/raspberry-pi-rasp...

[LastTrain]

Second link says sold out.

[Aurornis]

8GB of LPDDR memory is around $100 in volume.

That leaves $100 for everything else on the Pi, including the hardware, building it, transporting it, and retailer margin.

That leaves $500 for everything else on the MacBook Neo.

That's why you can get so much more from the MacBook Neo. There's 5X as much budget for everything other than RAM.

[yftsui]

Assume the numbers are correct, Pi spent $100 for a PCB with some components; Neo's hardware includes keyboard, 13 inch display, aluminum chassis, battery, charger. You remove the costs of the above from that $500.

[rerdavies]

I'm wondering how "everything just costs twice for exactly the same thing because it's Apple" factors into the equation.

[8fingerlouie]

I was recently looking for an upgrade for my aging HA Green, and I had an 8GB RPi5 with a m.2 hat, case and PSU selected, but when I checked prices I could get an 8GB Zimaboard 2 that includes 32GB eMMC for $10 more than the RPi, and that gets me a n150 processor, 2x2.5Gbit networking, 2 SATA ports and a PCIe expansion port. It idles at 5-7W.

So yeah, the RPi5 has gotten prohibitively expensive, at least to the point where a chinesium mini pc is cheaper, has better performance, and about the same power consumption.

[imp0cat]

Why were you looking for a replacement/upgrade? Is your HA Green failing, or is it just too slow?

Asking as someone who is considering purchasing one (just to run HA on it, obviously).

[8fingerlouie]

I kinda just outgrew it.

I migrated from Homey to HA, and with 2500+ entities across some 250-300 devices the HA Green performed well. It would sit at about 55% RAM usage with 5-7% CPU load, so in no way resource strained.

My storage however was not exactly doing well. I frequently hit 80% or more storage used (of the 32GB eMMC). The HA Green uses USB2 and has no connectors for adding more storage like the M.2 slot on the HA Yellow, so there was no easy upgrade path.

Compute wise and RAM wise the device did well. I ran HA, Mosquito, ESPHome Device Builder, Matter Server, OpenThread Border Router, Piper, Speech to Phrase and a couple other add-ons, and besides the speech stuff it worked well and responded fast to almost everything.

Speech in any other language than English is slow at best. English is a little better, but don't expect to have long conversations with it in realtime. For my use case, of making one way announcements, it didn't matter much if it spent 3 or 30 seconds preparing the announcement, it would arrive when it arrived.

The HA Green lives on in my summerhouse which has around 900 entities and maybe 50 devices. It works well there, sits at 2% CPU, 39% RAM, and 45% storage, so I guess it depends on the "size" of your installation.

At home I'm monitoring "all the things", EV stats, EV Charger stats, heat pump stats, TRVs, smart electricity meter, room level presence detection (Bluetooth LE), mmWave presence detection, Smart Switches, Smart TVs, Apple TVs, Sonos Speakers, everything. I also have around 100 automations dealing with various house states, like when the heat pump and EV charger both kick in at full power, an automation will tell the EV charger to chill a bit before it blows the main fuse, and once the heat pump finishes its cycle, ramp up the EV charger again.

The summerhouse, on account of being smaller, naturally has less stuff going on. It's a place for relaxation, and most automations and sensors there are targeted at detecting stuff when we're not around like water leaks, temperature drops, heating anomalies, motion detection by the cameras, etc.

[imp0cat]

Thanks, appreciate the response.

Sounds like the HA Green should be more than enough for my needs - that is testing if the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence of my Amazon-walled garden.

[kristianp]

And the n150 supports AVX2: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241636/...

[bigyabai]

I dunno, it's not unexpected. Smartphone hardware has been cheaper, more proliferate and faster than Raspberry Pis for a while. The Pi Foundation finds a market by supporting Linux, documenting GPIO and Arduino/hat ecosystems, and advocating for a hackier, server-like approach with the cheap hardware. Game consoles, smartphones and consumer laptops are often powerful, but priced taking the customer's service revenue into account.

My Raspberry Pi is definitely outclassed by a few of my old phones and laptops. But it's also super pleasant to host services on, so it's my go-to SBC.

[LtWorf]

Phones don't have any I/O and android is a pain in the ass to experiment with. Plus by default it will do things like powersave.

[NoGravitas]

If I could install PostmarketOS (and a close-to-mainline kernel?) on one of my old smartphones, I'd rather use that for my cyberdeck project than a Pi. I'm not prepared to do a pmos bring-up on an unsupported phone, though.

[LtWorf]

Good luck with that, I think the chance that your phone is supported and works are very slim unless you bought it on purpose for that.

[zerobees]

Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.

You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.

[peterburkimsher]

Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).

I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.

[dannyw]

There’s something really fun about writing your own microcontroller code as a software engineer that hasn’t worked with embedded before. At least for me.

Before you just vibe code, consider if it piques your interest. You might just enjoy learning, playing, and building with something new.

When you get stuck, hand it over to AI.

[barnas2]

I built a portable meshtastic terminal using Claude and a Pico 2. It's written 100% of the code in MicroPython and it works great. It even wrote the driver for the E-ink screen I'm using. I built a jig to hold a webcam and the e-ink screen, then had Claude write a script/MCP that takes a photo and crops just the screen out. Then I asked it to figure out a driver, and after a 20 minute loop of taking photos and updating it's driver, it was done.

[HerbManic]

A lot of things wouldn't even need a RP2350. The original Arduino alone was pretty slick for a lot of cool small scale projects.

[RetroTechie]

Our ancestors would spin in their graves seeing how much compute power people throw at a few blinkenlights.

[rjrjrjrj]

A Mac Neo would be great.

But for now, Intel N150 mini PCs are probably a better choice than RPi for those types of tasks.

[HerbManic]

I saw a talk about a year back with them arguing that things like N150 platforms are probably a better choice than Pi based machines.

Came down to, wide software support with x86, higher performance, UEFI, secure boot and storage standards like NVME slots. It was a fair argument but doesn't apply to everyone.

[niutech]

You can get Radxa ROCK 5C 16GB RAM for $160 on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007473801146.html

[elorant]

Raspberries are basically for DIY projects. I have one on my router handling call blocking for my landline. If it was costing $300 I would rather get a mini PC or use one of my defunct phones with UserLand on it. I can't see any world where a comparison to an entry level laptop makes sense.

[pibaker]

You don't need a $300 pi for call blocking. They still make and sell $30 models that will be an overkill for your use case.

[shye]

Or $3 for an ESP32 devboard.

[__patchbit__]

Apple could bridge the gap between Mac Mini Pro and HomePod Mini for the Neo to try experimental local AI configs in need of more memory and storage. The Vision Neo completes the three part environment system for students in biology or morphogenesis and robot design.

[flobosg]

> Mac Micro

Mac Nano, just like iPods!

[steveBK123]

Correct take

[HerbManic]

Mac Nugget. Mac-aroon. SnackBook.

[sleepybrett]

... there is no mac micro, but there is an appletv

[drnick1]

Locked down BS appliance.

[sleepybrett]

with that new cheaporino macbook running on the same chip, i imagine it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to install and boot it on tv hardware.

[jrm4]

The war on general purpose computing is real.

[dpe82]

Also known as: supply and demand.

[roody15]

Education price for schools is 499$ for the Neo. Have to agree no longer sure the pi makes much sense at this price point.

[Pavilion2095]

These are two very different devices that serve two very different purposes. The comparison is flawed.

[LtWorf]

Except that a rpi is a device made for learning things and a Neo is a device made to be a door to a shop.

[roody15]

Agree, I just meant on the pricing. I like the rpi, have hads lots of fun with the rpi4 making a custom home media player. Just at this price point not sure it makes much sense for as many people to play around with.

[LtWorf]

I use two rpi4 with a touchscreen and some relays connected to gpio to control my lights, speakers, heater, and with some USB-powered speakers I have internet radio (usable also as alarm) and I can see when the bus comes and set timers for cooking. Since the USB-powered speakers emit noise when not in use, I power down the USB port entirely when they are not in use. I use openbox to start my software and have a couple of python daemons to control the relays and decide what to turn on and off. Also they don't have a battery so I'm not in need to keep an eye on something that might explode.