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I remember the early years the Pi was more focused on children's education and the same sort of path the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) took... But the great thin

I remember the early years the Pi was more focused on children's education and the same sort of path the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) took... But the great thing was they could quickly scale up the manufacturing to the point where these $35 computers were available to almost anyone, and since that time a huge ecosystem has flourished, and still grows, even after wave after wave of clones has appeared. I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support. Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things. Though I hate the closed source bits that power the Pi's Broadcom SoC, and how some of the hardware details can be locked behind restrictive NDAs, I'm happy Broadcom seems to have continued interest in feeding the project over the years.

treesknees 5y ago
I was worried early on about availability. They started with the goal of getting into classrooms, being cheap so kids or low-income schools can afford them, but then you also had for-profit businesses buying hundreds of these to power kiosks and digital signage. I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I suspect that was an initial concern too, until they came to terms with the idea that e.g. Cisco's requirements in a Raspberry Pi were both achievable and also help underwrite production of more imaginative things.
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  > I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money. I think the RPi's attraction for commercial users is less the price point and more the size of the community around it. It's by far the most approachable system to work with when you need a small linux device with cameras and gpio.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. It is, especially when you consider economies of scale with things like computer production. Building 50 boards is expensive. Building 500 is cheaper. Building 5 million? That's now custom equipment dedicated to the project, and costs just plummet per unit. I also like the Pi4 model in which the "higher end" versions seem to be more profitable, subsidizing the lower cost/RAM models.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    Yeah the fact is that the more demand there is for it the cheaper they can make it, so everybody wins in the end. Well except the people living around the place where the raw materials are extracted, but that's another story.
  - hhh 5y ago
    The RPi would be viable in my work at any price lower than the cheapest Intel NUC. We’ve bought 800 since November. We’ve decimated our Windows licensing costs, power use, MTBI, and shrunk our attack surface considerably. There is really no competitor that has even been a consideration for us. Software stack is the hardest to get right with them at scale for fleet management IMO.
    - shard 5y ago
      Do you mean that your company has switched 800 employees from Windows machines to RPi? Are the 800 people non-engineering? Are the RPis thin clients? Everything running in the cloud?
      - jenscow 5y ago
        I was thinking servers.
Teknoman117 5y ago
Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years. I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specifically was super neat in that it had a ton of IO (PWM, A2D, encoder inputs, SPI, UART, etc.) that could be controlled by either the CPU or microcontrollers embedded in the SoC. Problem is at this point I have no idea what to do with any of them. ARM CPUs got so much faster in such a short span of time that it feels like arm boards from a few years ago are kind of just junk today. There are many dirt cheap boards that are way faster than a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or the 700 MHz armv6 core in the OG Pi) available today.
- blippage 5y ago
  I've never owned a Beagle. I discovered earlier this year that they were open hardware and even had real-time capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Pi should have been. Then I saw the price. So I'll be sticking with Pis. It would be a master-stroke if the Pi gained real-time capabilities.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    The BeagleBone Black was $45 at launch (10 years ago, ouch), which was $10 more than the Pi B. At this point they certainly seem to have abandoned that price point. The first BeagleBone (the 'White') was $85, but it had a JTAG debugger embedded in it so you could actually single step through the Linux kernel if you wanted.
- schaefer 5y ago
  I share that sentiment. I'm so sad that the Beagle project doesn't come out with a CPU refresh.
  - myself248 5y ago
    The BBAI doesn't count?
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support. Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix. > Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things. This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things. Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops. Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.
- megous 5y ago
  > This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things. Total picture is that I can't still run mainline Linux on Rapsberry Pi 2B without losing a bunch of basic features, while I can run it on almost all my Orange Pis. This makes Raspberry Pi very annoying to use. I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room. Nope. No audio support mainline after like 7 years after release.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Sure, but how many Orange Pi-like sbc's bother to advertise mainline kernel compatibility? That matters too if you want ease of support. The Raspberry Pi folks have a long history of working with the kernel dev community; their support is not just hacked together after-the-fact.
    - 5y ago
MikusR 5y ago
If they'd taken the same path OLPC did there would not be a Ten Years of Raspberry Pi.
opan 5y ago
Pine is in a league of its own by now, with the RK3399 and some of the other chips used in their boards having pretty fleshed out mainline support. I would personally consider them better options than a Raspberry Pi just based on software options. You can slap postmarketOS on a handful of Pine stuff now and get very up-to-date stuff.
- trs-80 5y ago
  I like PINE64's stuff, too. Armbian is another good choice, for people who prefer Debian based OS.

treesknees 5y ago

I was worried early on about availability. They started with the goal of getting into classrooms, being cheap so kids or low-income schools can afford them, but then you also had for-profit businesses buying hundreds of these to power kiosks and digital signage. I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I suspect that was an initial concern too, until they came to terms with the idea that e.g. Cisco's requirements in a Raspberry Pi were both achievable and also help underwrite production of more imaginative things.
laurencerowe 5y ago
> I was a little put off at first that these educational tools were being snatched up by businesses trying to save money. I think the RPi's attraction for commercial users is less the price point and more the size of the community around it. It's by far the most approachable system to work with when you need a small linux device with cameras and gpio.
Syonyk 5y ago
> I'd almost describe it as "taking advantage" but perhaps that's too harsh. It is, especially when you consider economies of scale with things like computer production. Building 50 boards is expensive. Building 500 is cheaper. Building 5 million? That's now custom equipment dedicated to the project, and costs just plummet per unit. I also like the Pi4 model in which the "higher end" versions seem to be more profitable, subsidizing the lower cost/RAM models.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Yeah the fact is that the more demand there is for it the cheaper they can make it, so everybody wins in the end. Well except the people living around the place where the raw materials are extracted, but that's another story.
- hhh 5y ago
  The RPi would be viable in my work at any price lower than the cheapest Intel NUC. We’ve bought 800 since November. We’ve decimated our Windows licensing costs, power use, MTBI, and shrunk our attack surface considerably. There is really no competitor that has even been a consideration for us. Software stack is the hardest to get right with them at scale for fleet management IMO.
  - shard 5y ago
    Do you mean that your company has switched 800 employees from Windows machines to RPi? Are the 800 people non-engineering? Are the RPis thin clients? Everything running in the cloud?
    - jenscow 5y ago
      I was thinking servers.

Teknoman117 5y ago

Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years. I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specifically was super neat in that it had a ton of IO (PWM, A2D, encoder inputs, SPI, UART, etc.) that could be controlled by either the CPU or microcontrollers embedded in the SoC. Problem is at this point I have no idea what to do with any of them. ARM CPUs got so much faster in such a short span of time that it feels like arm boards from a few years ago are kind of just junk today. There are many dirt cheap boards that are way faster than a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or the 700 MHz armv6 core in the OG Pi) available today.

blippage 5y ago
I've never owned a Beagle. I discovered earlier this year that they were open hardware and even had real-time capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Pi should have been. Then I saw the price. So I'll be sticking with Pis. It would be a master-stroke if the Pi gained real-time capabilities.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  The BeagleBone Black was $45 at launch (10 years ago, ouch), which was $10 more than the Pi B. At this point they certainly seem to have abandoned that price point. The first BeagleBone (the 'White') was $85, but it had a JTAG debugger embedded in it so you could actually single step through the Linux kernel if you wanted.
schaefer 5y ago
I share that sentiment. I'm so sad that the Beagle project doesn't come out with a CPU refresh.
- myself248 5y ago
  The BBAI doesn't count?
  - Teknoman117 5y ago

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support. Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix. > Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things. This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things. Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops. Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.

megous 5y ago
> This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things. Total picture is that I can't still run mainline Linux on Rapsberry Pi 2B without losing a bunch of basic features, while I can run it on almost all my Orange Pis. This makes Raspberry Pi very annoying to use. I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room. Nope. No audio support mainline after like 7 years after release.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Sure, but how many Orange Pi-like sbc's bother to advertise mainline kernel compatibility? That matters too if you want ease of support. The Raspberry Pi folks have a long history of working with the kernel dev community; their support is not just hacked together after-the-fact.
  - 5y ago

MikusR 5y ago

If they'd taken the same path OLPC did there would not be a Ten Years of Raspberry Pi.

opan 5y ago

Pine is in a league of its own by now, with the RK3399 and some of the other chips used in their boards having pretty fleshed out mainline support. I would personally consider them better options than a Raspberry Pi just based on software options. You can slap postmarketOS on a handful of Pine stuff now and get very up-to-date stuff.

trs-80 5y ago
I like PINE64's stuff, too. Armbian is another good choice, for people who prefer Debian based OS.