I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.
I don’t get how they can justify this. I can get a proper mini PC with 16GB RAM and an 500GB NVME SSD for less than that.
The parts SBCs use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded applications.
use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded
I mean, yeah I’m aware that LPDDR SDRAM chips are in short supply as a lot of the capacity was shifted for other types of SDRAM, but is it enough to allow for an entire SSD to be included at the same price? Its not like flash prices haven’t also increased a ton.
I was also thinking that there are cooling systems (fans are expensive!), cases, etc. that add costs to mini PCs that mean they really shouldn’t compete with SBC in price.
Just wait for a few months for an existing stock of prebuilt PCs to run out, and you’ll see their price jump even higher.
Cheap Chinese Pi knockoffs like OrangePi are also becoming more expensive, it’s because the cost of the components increases. AI companies now buying all RAM and every RAM, even ancient DDR3.
I don’t know but this guy seems to understand it
So what I’m gathering is I should set aside my wife’s broken pixel phone to use as a low power server.
I mean generally, how much computational power is lying around in discarded smart phones?
How much I reached potential is there in some sort of clustering solution to distribute the load such that 2-6 smartphones can get some real work done?
Only problem with that is the spicy battery pillow.
This is for 16GB. 1G is $45, 2G is $77.
My 1G pi three is still working fine.
Okay that’s good to know. Honestly I always considered a Pi a single use, light weight device that just happens to run common ARM64. When they went for 8/16GB of RAM it felt like they were trying to turn them into mini general purpose computers.
I thought the Pi 5 was too expensive when it came out. This is just ridiculous. For most uses, a used PC, phone or tablet would be a much better choice. The only Pi I would even consider using is the Zero 2W, but they’ve been out of stock all year.
Its not actually that crazy given this is for the 16gb model. Ram is fucked at the moment 🤷♂️
The real power of the Pi 5 is as is a testbed that can easily convert to the CM5.
For people using them as small computers they make no real sense though
Glad I bought several when they were <$100
Holy shit I spent like $75 on one of these with a case…
Thanks, Sam, ‘I want to take your computers away and make you rent from the cloud,’ Altman.
At that price, you might as well buy an Intel NUC Mini PC. You’d get more performance at a similar price, and it’s x86 instead of ARM.
Good investment opportunity
Boards with single memory chips are hit the hardest. When you increase the memory you have to go with a much denser individual chip and the denser the chip the more expensive it is.
Couldn’t they have made the board a bit bigger? Even throwing in older ram would have been a win if it meant keeping prices down and total ram size.
I think moving away from the standard board size would kinda defeat the purpose. All the projects designed to fit the Pi formfactor would be useless. They’d have to design a whole new line, and have none of the ecosystem they’ve built to support it.
Then why did they have a model A and B? Couldn’t they have a C or BE (extended)
The board sizes remained pretty much the same though, a pi 5 can fit in lots of 3b project without huge changes.
You can install armbian on cheap android tv boxes. Essentially the same thing.
I bought a fucking laptop with 16gb of ram and a touchscreen for barely more than that in 2015
