7 ms·

My flabber is gasted at people complaining about paying a meaty $49 for a quad-core, 64bit, cpu with 8gb of local storage. Twenty years ago I was writing docs f

• tty7 9y ago
  so? $49 is way too expensive for this. i can get a x86 from ebay way more cheaper than this. who would even bother, the rpi zero is $5.
  • Teever 9y ago
    I've never seen a rpi zero for $5 in my country. At least $11 and then there's shipping. and limits of one per customer.
    • fomojola 9y ago
      (Anecdata) If you happen to be in Cambridge Massachusetts go to MicroCenter and ask: I have 5 that have all been bought at $5 ($10 for the Pi Zero W, which is still incredible to me).
    • berbec 9y ago
      I've bought multiple Pi Zero Ws for $5 at my local microcenter. The first one is $5 but the second one is $15. I just would pick one up on lunch every couple days. I have four in my house. $20
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        I wish they didn't pull that shit, though. I can't buy two of them because of that. I didn't even know you can buy more than one, every site limits to one per order. I wish they just priced them normally and let me buy them in bulk. Right now my Pi Zero is collecting dust because I know I can't find a second one easily. Meanwhile, I buy ESP8266s by the tens and use them for every throwaway purpose.
  • bunderbunder 9y ago
    Not an apples-to-apples comparison. The pi zero has no wireless, a single-core ARM11 CPU, no on-board flash storage, less than half as many GPIO pins, requires a higher supply voltage, etc etc. The pi 3 is much more comparable, and at a much more comparable price, especially after you add in the price of the SD card, which is necessary. Pi 3 is also much bigger, and, I'm guessing, draws more power.
    • hdra 9y ago
      Pi Zero W includes wlan and bluetooth, and the kit that includes PSU and SD card cost around ~$35. Stil I agree, its not really comparable. The Pis is mostly learning/teaching tool. I can see using this in a product directly. Something I would grab when I needed something more than an ESP.
      • deleted 9y ago
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    • Nexxxeh 9y ago
      The closer comparison is with the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules. Notably the 3 and 3 Lite, with eMMC and without respectively, $30 and $25. No wireless though.
  • voltagex_ 9y ago
    I'll PayPal you $5 if you can show me a receipt for a purchased Pi Zero for $5.
    • nmjohn 9y ago
      I've ordered multiple rpi zero's / zero w's at cost ($5/$10 respectively) + a few dollars for shipping. Purchased through adafruit, pi hut, and canakit. No need for a receipt, it's in stock for purchase right now [0][1][2] What you don't get however, is the ability to purchase them in any bulk quantity at that price. However the bulk price is still much less than $49. [0]: https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero.html https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero.html [1]: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero [2]: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3400 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3400
    • hoffs 9y ago
      https://imgur.com/gallery/myVny https://imgur.com/gallery/myVny my PayPal is masle.com@gmail.com. Thanks!
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        That's more like ten dollars though.
        • lorenzhs 9y ago
          Nobody claimed it was $5 including shipping. It's still £3.82 ($5.32) without VAT (deducting it since US prices never include sales tax, either) and shipping at Pimoroni UK right now.
          • StavrosK 9y ago
            It's not $5 plus $5 shipping unless I can buy three for $20. Otherwise it's just $10 including shipping. Since you can't buy more than one, "shipping" is just a way to get the price up. It's like those eBay sellers who sell a $10 item for $1 and charge $12 for shipping, per item.
  • squarefoot 9y ago
    The RPi Zero at $5 is a (hardly verifiable) reality only for a few lucky purchasers, especially writers in some blogs/magazines, but an urban legend for everyone else. 10 people every now and then telling the world they got it at $5 mean nothing when there are thousands who can't get it without price inflating bundles. We already know why it is produced in so scarce quantities, so I won't comment further. Besides that, the RPi Zero has also way inferior capabilities compared to this one.. Regarding the Emlid board, yes, it's way overpriced, but it doesn't seem a product aimed at makers -though it also tries to sell itself as such-. Once you add the board to make it useable the price will grow a lot. To me it has its uses as an industrial module manufacturers can stick into their products. I personally would rather get a NanoPi NEO2 plus its dock at a total cost of $28, or 10 more for 1GB RAM, and the OrangePI also has some boards with similar characteristics, but that's a personal choice: Nano/OrangePI boards are wonderful boards for makers and experimenters but if you're building something critical then you should look elsewhere. If the Emlid board satisfies safety requirements then its price is totally justified (and selling it as a makers board could do bad PR), otherwise they should make a breadboard friendly version at a lower price.
    • imtringued 9y ago
      THe RPi Zero is misleading. It has less performance than this. The direct competitor is the RPi3 and costs $35 which is $15 less and it doesnt require a breakout board to access it's IO. The eMMC is the only interesting aspect about this board. SD card manufacturers can get away with using the shittiest flash and controllers they can find because SD cards can be replaced. eMMC is not user serviceable and therefore actually needs to be... you know... reliable. This board is clearly not for hobbyists. It's intended for hardware startups that will design their own custom breakout boards.
    • nottorp 9y ago
      For the record, I have a few RPi Zeros but they were all sold as kits costing $20-$30. Also, PIs aren't so solid. Definitely not good for industrial use.
    • hellweaver666 9y ago
      I'm not sure where you live, but the Pi Zero isn't a myth. Just this week I bought two Pi Zero HW's and a standard Pi Zero. The standard Zero was just over €5 + shipping. I could only buy one zero, but I could have bought 50 or more of the HW's as they don't have the purchase restriction. The Pi Zero is easily obtainable now Adafruit have it for $5+shipping in the US, Kiwi-electronics have it for €5+shipping in Europe and Pimoroni have it for £5+shipping in the UK. Hardly a myth.
  • alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Could you send me a link? I'm in the market for one of these boards and would be interested to see what the alternative secondhand option would be. Better to reuse & recycle than create more landfill.
• quickthrower2 9y ago
  Depends what you are going to do with it. If you are buying 1 for a hobby, you have a point. If you are buying 10000 for you business, you'll care about the cost down to the cent.
  • osivertsson 9y ago
    Designing your own board looks easy from the outside, but quickly turns out to take a lot of effort and time as you work through PCB design, first boards, initial bring-up, tweaks, new boards, EOL notice one of your components, slight redesign, and finally you're headed of to (pre-)certifications only to find you need to fix something there. This assumes that your SoC vendor actually cares about you as a customer and provides you all documentation, erratas, and EOL notices in a timely manner and not considers you a liability that due to small volumes (<1M) will never earn someone in the SoC company any real bonuses. I'm making a living developing big and small embedded systems for customers as a software developer, so I see this mostly from the outside, and depending on the experience of your team and how good your contacts to your component suppliers are, you may be able to speed up the process. But for sure it takes a lot of effort to get to the stage where you have what this $49 SOM gives you. $49 times 10k units is quickly eaten into, and then have you have to consider what value you put on time to market.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  It never ceases to amaze me how cheap our industry is, even about buying our own products.
• nsb1 9y ago
  It really depends on what you want to do with this product. What you're getting for $49 is hopefully a stable, tested, and well-supported platform which can really help when all you want to do (or can afford to do) is concentrate on the other aspects of your product. Built-in OTA upgrades and pre-built manufacturing tools are very helpful as well. The $49 price point however, assuming a retail product, probably puts your final retail price north of $100 by the time you add in all the other components you're going to need to make this work plus profit. If your product fits into that space then you could save a lot of time going with a solution like this (but I do see a cost-reduction round in your near future). If you're trying to stay below the magic $99 retail price point though, you may be in for a challenge. Do you need a battery? Is that chip antenna good enough or do you need to have a better one made? Plastics? Power supply? Those DF40-80 connectors alone are going to account for north of $1 in manufacturing quantities. And after all that, you still have to pay for whatever it is your product actually does. When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If I don't need 8GB of flash, I don't buy it. Likewise quad core - how big a battery am I going to need to drive that thing for whatever my requierment is? Could I save $5 on the battery by dropping to single core (and save another $1 there too)? As with anything, I think the use case for this amounts to "It Depends". I think the price point for this puts it out of range of the IOT space, and it is over-spec'd for a basic RF bridge type application (plus all the issues that go with trying to control noise when you don't own the chip layout). Maybe as the driver for a custom touchpad or something like that. Suffice it to say that I think it has a market, but that's probably not competing in the IOT space, and likely not the prototype space either. $.02
  • LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    > When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If you can spend (just) a month or two designing, debugging, and procuring a cost-optimized variant of this that costs $25 instead, your time spent on that is equivalent to just buying a thousand of these. One of the big things in the "it depends" question is how many of these things you plan to sell. If it's less than thousands, buy modules.