Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February : opensource

[+] [email protected] 217 points 10 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 10 months ago

Yea. I miss those days.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I wouldn't expect that kind of price anymore except for the Zero models.

[+] [email protected] 97 points 10 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.

At the same time, for more serious projects, it's lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.

I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago

The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (5 children)

You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?

And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (11 children)

Yet they're still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

I'd rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don't need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let's be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it's pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (8 children)

The cheapest rpi that isn't a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.

The pi 5 won't ever be $35 because that's not the price point it was designed to hit. That's why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can get the zero 2 w for 15-20

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The Pi foundation showed their true colors. Don't continue to support them.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What did they do, I'm out of the loop?

[–] [email protected] 117 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.

And now that they're finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they've jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.

Don't forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they're the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.

That's just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi's for surveillance..

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

Also if you get a slightly bigger form factor, you can just buy a much better one.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.

But i have trouble investing further into them.

They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
It looks like they are abandoning their older products. vcgencmd for example is still broken on the 3B+. Since they "fixed" it for the 4B. See https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:

The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.

Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)

That is so dump.

Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Are they still telling their users to suck it?

https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/

[–] [email protected] 60 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (6 children)

Pi 5 sucks massive balls.

They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn't work with any normal USB C psu.

This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn't included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.

Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)

The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.

I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.

Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it's so sad what's become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.

The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.

If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Even the recommended 5V3A supply for the Pi4 is non-standard and requires you to either buy the official power brick or wade through a sea of sketchy Chinese knockoffs that may or may not deliver their rated power. I don't understand why they haven't explored alternative connectors or slapped a voltage regulator on the board in order to use a 12V supply. 5V5A USB is just ridiculous. USB only makes sense when you're using universal requirements, but this might as well be a barrel connector as you can't use any normal USB charger with it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I think pi is on the road to mainstream. Probably time to shift to an open source hardware competitor to boost it. Not saying pi is bad, I have one and its great. Those like me who love tinkering should consider going the extra mile and „radicalize“ themselves to open hardware. The project I hear the most of is Banana-PI. https://www.banana-pi.org

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Most alternatives use Rockchips such as Rk3566 or 3588 which are better in every way to the Pi chips of their respective price points. As long as they don't use the Allwinner chips it's usually decent out of the box but still a bit lacking.

I like Orange Pi more. They have pretty good out of the box documentation and a good range of hardware.

Radxa is also an option but they seem to offer the same stuff as Orange Pi but more expensive.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

If you're thinking about buying, be aware they removed the audio jack.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (2 children)

And still using micro-HDMI for some godforsaken reason

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago

They also removed hardware encoding. They've had the same shitty h264 1080p encoder forever, but it was better than nothing.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (15 children)

Ok, I can buy a quad core thin client for $30. The prices for these are too high for what they are.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm just hoping rockchip gets better kernel support. They are way better positioned on the CxB scale.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

$100 for no h265 hardware encoding.

Hard pass.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (7 children)

But you can get a used thinkcentre tiny mini micro on ebay for $80. Wtf would I spend 100+ on a pi?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Energy efficiency?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most ppl do not bother to calculate that in(especially idle consumption) or living in an area where it basically does not matter.

But yes, no x86-64 device comes close.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I was thinking more along the lines of battery powered operations. I can stick a Pi, a car battery, a solar panel into a weather proof box and set it in the woods if I needed to.

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