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Upvoted because while your comment is provocative, it's at least interestingly so. > everything the pi is touted to do, you can either accomplish with existing

Upvoted because while your comment is provocative, it's at least interestingly so. > everything the pi is touted to do, you can either accomplish with existing general computing or something like an arduino (and as a benefit, learn some electrical theory as well.) This may be true, but was it true when the Pi was released? For me, the Pi sits in an uncomfortable position where it's not really the best at anything it does. It's promoted at being for education, but arguably there are better solutions, and almost certainly the overwhelming majority of Pis purchased are by individuals and businesses, so this is a kind of misleading advertising. They included a chip for media decoding (including 4K HEVC), which is a dead giveaway that much of the draw isn't the education market, but it's shockingly limited. For instance, despite support for HDR being advertised with the release of the Pi 4, as far as I know it still doesn't work at all. High bitrate media often fails to decode in real time. So if it's a HTPC type use, you'd be much better served by an Nvidia Shield or something like that. The emphasis on netboot support suggests that they envision enterprise use cases, but it took them forever after the Pi was released to have this working fully. They include hardware design files that suggest it's designed for the hobbyist hardware market, but yet it's not truly open hardware at all, and in fact they've been drifting further away from that ideal over time. If anything, the niche is probably tinkering with hardware (given the number of add-on products), without having to jump in all the way with an arduino, but how many people who buy a Pi actually end up doing any of that? In the end, I suspect a lot of people bought them for the novelty of a $35 Linux computer. I say all that, but naturally I own 3 of them myself. :-)

wmf 6y ago
The RPi uses chips originally designed for set top boxes which kinda explains the video focus (that and every SoC has video decoding these days).
kingosticks 6y ago
> and in fact they've been drifting further away from that ideal over time. Can you provide a source where "open hardware" was touted as an ideal for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It's a cheap education platform built on Broadcom hardware. I don't think there was ever much chance the Broadcom h/w was going to be open. And that's maybe sad for some people but it won't stop the Foundation achieving its actual goals. Open hardware enthusiasts can vote with their wallet, for all the impact it'll have. It must be one of the best selling novelty products of all time.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > It must be one of the best selling novelty products of all time. Indeed it is. As I mentioned in my comment, I own three of these novelty products. My post wasn't really intended as a knock of the RPI foundation, despite the fact that it's been read that way. > Can you provide a source where "open hardware" was touted as an ideal for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I never presented it as an ideal for the RPI foundation. It's the ideal for hardware tinkerers, and the fact that RPI isn't really friendly to that market undermines the idea that hardware tinkering is the Pi's niche. That's the overall point of my comment: the Raspberry Pi doesn't really have a niche. That said, they did brag on their blog back in 2012 that "the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way." I think it's fair to say that this seemed like more of a priority in the past, and many of the geeky people who initially jumped on the Raspberry train were hoping to see it move more in that direction. (I was one of them: I was spamming the refresh button when the Pi was released to try to get one.) There's also, I suspect, a bit of frustration from the open source hardware community towards RPI for capitalizing / cannibalizing that market. For example, this Ars article [1] refers to "the open source nature of Raspberry Pi (even the schematics are online!)", which we all know is untrue, of course. Anyway, I guess I was just airing a few frustrations here. The Raspberry Pi is fun to play with, and the community is great (if you stay far away from the official forums). It's just that it's a bit of a jack of all trades, and isn't really ideal for any of the purposes I'd think to use it for. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-incorrect-usb-c-design-wont-work-with-some-chargers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-...
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    That's interesting about the old blog post, I think we forget what a state things were back then that this was such a big deal. I was there refreshing with you but not for hope of open hardware. For me it's a cheap board with fantastic support that can do loads of tasks. Albeit not perfectly and there's quite a price jump to get something better, but that's just a testament to the awesome price point they keep hitting. I'm not convinced open hardware enthusiasts have much to grumble about, the offerings before rpi were poor and the market/community jumped forward tremendously on the back of rpi success.

wmf 6y ago

The RPi uses chips originally designed for set top boxes which kinda explains the video focus (that and every SoC has video decoding these days).

kingosticks 6y ago

> and in fact they've been drifting further away from that ideal over time. Can you provide a source where "open hardware" was touted as an ideal for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It's a cheap education platform built on Broadcom hardware. I don't think there was ever much chance the Broadcom h/w was going to be open. And that's maybe sad for some people but it won't stop the Foundation achieving its actual goals. Open hardware enthusiasts can vote with their wallet, for all the impact it'll have. It must be one of the best selling novelty products of all time.

bscphil 6y ago
> It must be one of the best selling novelty products of all time. Indeed it is. As I mentioned in my comment, I own three of these novelty products. My post wasn't really intended as a knock of the RPI foundation, despite the fact that it's been read that way. > Can you provide a source where "open hardware" was touted as an ideal for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I never presented it as an ideal for the RPI foundation. It's the ideal for hardware tinkerers, and the fact that RPI isn't really friendly to that market undermines the idea that hardware tinkering is the Pi's niche. That's the overall point of my comment: the Raspberry Pi doesn't really have a niche. That said, they did brag on their blog back in 2012 that "the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way." I think it's fair to say that this seemed like more of a priority in the past, and many of the geeky people who initially jumped on the Raspberry train were hoping to see it move more in that direction. (I was one of them: I was spamming the refresh button when the Pi was released to try to get one.) There's also, I suspect, a bit of frustration from the open source hardware community towards RPI for capitalizing / cannibalizing that market. For example, this Ars article [1] refers to "the open source nature of Raspberry Pi (even the schematics are online!)", which we all know is untrue, of course. Anyway, I guess I was just airing a few frustrations here. The Raspberry Pi is fun to play with, and the community is great (if you stay far away from the official forums). It's just that it's a bit of a jack of all trades, and isn't really ideal for any of the purposes I'd think to use it for. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-incorrect-usb-c-design-wont-work-with-some-chargers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-...
- kingosticks 6y ago
  That's interesting about the old blog post, I think we forget what a state things were back then that this was such a big deal. I was there refreshing with you but not for hope of open hardware. For me it's a cheap board with fantastic support that can do loads of tasks. Albeit not perfectly and there's quite a price jump to get something better, but that's just a testament to the awesome price point they keep hitting. I'm not convinced open hardware enthusiasts have much to grumble about, the offerings before rpi were poor and the market/community jumped forward tremendously on the back of rpi success.