3 ms·

the lengths people are going to make this awful videocore soc not annoying to use

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
This incredibly cheap, low-energy-consumption soc with an incredible community behind it, yes. Like... yes, the chip is all kinds of weird and messy under the hood, but in practice it works well for people.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  I have no doubts about the community, which is the main reason why Raspberry Pi is recommended to all people without much experience with such small computers. However "incredibly cheap" is not appropriate when referring to Raspberry Pi. Its price is OK considering its performance, neither cheap nor expensive for what you get. There are a lot of applications for which Raspberry Pi is fast enough, but almost all of those could be implemented using even cheaper microcontroller boards, with prices around $10, but programming those requires more knowledge, so they are less accessible for most people. Besides clones more or less equivalent with Raspberry Pi, there are also a lot of models that are more expensive than Pi, but those are also proportionately faster than Raspberry Pi, so their higher price is justified. I have experimented with Raspberry Pi, but eventually I did not use it for anything, because all my applications happened to be in those 2 categories mentioned above, i.e. either suitable for even cheaper devices or suitable for faster but also more expensive devices. So Raspberry Pi can be a good solution for some people and it has a decent price for its features, but there are a large number of other devices with similar or better power consumption and price/performance ratio.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    The barrier to entry with a microcontroller is at least one order of magnitude beyond "I can plug a keyboard and monitor in and type in some basic Python to do whatever I want."
    - imtringued 6y ago
      If that's all you want to do then you should get a Pinebook instead. It's far less expensive than buying a monitor and keyboard separately. (Yes, I didn't even include the cost of the Raspberry Pi, PSU and SD card).

This incredibly cheap, low-energy-consumption soc with an incredible community behind it, yes. Like... yes, the chip is all kinds of weird and messy under the hood, but in practice it works well for people.

adrian_b 6y ago
I have no doubts about the community, which is the main reason why Raspberry Pi is recommended to all people without much experience with such small computers. However "incredibly cheap" is not appropriate when referring to Raspberry Pi. Its price is OK considering its performance, neither cheap nor expensive for what you get. There are a lot of applications for which Raspberry Pi is fast enough, but almost all of those could be implemented using even cheaper microcontroller boards, with prices around $10, but programming those requires more knowledge, so they are less accessible for most people. Besides clones more or less equivalent with Raspberry Pi, there are also a lot of models that are more expensive than Pi, but those are also proportionately faster than Raspberry Pi, so their higher price is justified. I have experimented with Raspberry Pi, but eventually I did not use it for anything, because all my applications happened to be in those 2 categories mentioned above, i.e. either suitable for even cheaper devices or suitable for faster but also more expensive devices. So Raspberry Pi can be a good solution for some people and it has a decent price for its features, but there are a large number of other devices with similar or better power consumption and price/performance ratio.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The barrier to entry with a microcontroller is at least one order of magnitude beyond "I can plug a keyboard and monitor in and type in some basic Python to do whatever I want."
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If that's all you want to do then you should get a Pinebook instead. It's far less expensive than buying a monitor and keyboard separately. (Yes, I didn't even include the cost of the Raspberry Pi, PSU and SD card).