7 ms·

The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $1

by VLM 4y ago

The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. The article claim that you can't compare a $150 "mini PC" to a cheap Pi is unrealistic. I got a lot of flack (elsewhere not here) for setting up a mini-cluster for K8S that used mini PCs that I claimed are cheaper than Pi. Note that I can actually buy a mini-PC for $150 whereas you can make up any imaginary MSRP you'd like for a Pi but you're paying $170 today on Amazon regardless if the unobtainable price is $5 or $99. There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi.

mb7733 4y ago
> The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. What is your definition of a dead market?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Nobody drives downtown anymore, the traffic is just too terrible!
- VLM 4y ago
  Not for new designs, milking .edu and .gov for all they can get, great specs but no delivery date, easier and more convenient to buy weed than their silicon ... it had a good run but it's just done now.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  I'm not sure I would call it "dead". "Generally available" means that I can order one or a dozen today for MSRP or less and get a shipping date between "today" and "end of the week". "In demand" means that I can order one today for a little over MSRP or look around for a sale to get one under, but I might not be able to find a single supplier who wants to sell me a dozen at once. "Speculation bubble" means that I can't find anyone to sell me one at MSRP without going to ridiculous lengths like setting bots out to scoop the competition, and I certainly can't call a distributor to get a dozen at MSRP -- but if I'm willing to pay a high premium, I can buy one today. I think RPi4 is in a speculation bubble.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Kind of dead for hobbyists, I'd say. Pi's used to be a super low budget, easily accessible computing platform, which is what made it so great for almost every project that needed more than an arduino. Now it's usually the hardest part to get, and the complete opposite of a "throwaway" computer that you can stick everywhere. I'm sure the pricing doesn't bother enterprise or industrial users, and the Pi Foundation is almost entirely devoted to catering to them. But hobbyists are super sensitive to pricing and ease of access, and the only reason to still use it is that tons of projects are already built to run on Pi's. Even then, Units are almost entirely allocated to enterprise/b2b demand, so the retail customer market is so extremely undersupplied that it's just not worth actively hunting for days just to run an interesting app you wanted to tinker with.
mindcrime 4y ago
The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. That's a temporary situation though. The RPi foundation folks have said the expect supply to be back to normal sometime this year.
- VLM 4y ago
  Its been the same credibility gap from those people since the unobtainable $5 Pi Zero back in 2015. Eight years and many models later they still don't ship at MSRP despite what they claim. However, their competition can and does ship on time what they advertise at MSRP. Its like two different marketplaces.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    I don't see them as having any major credibility gap personally. Until the crazy chipageddon stuff started (which, BTW, affected the entire industry) I was routinely to buy Raspbery Pi 4 Model B boards at (approximately) MSRP. Same for the Pi 3 before that. Call me crazy, but I don't have any problem believing that things will get back to normal soon, and that Pi's of various sorts will indeed return to MSRP, or very near MSRP.
  - sliken 4y ago
    They do ship at MSRP, to a large number of corporate partners that embed the Pi in their products. Apparently at the rate of 30M per year. However much like the bitcoin miners who slurped up the GPUs for years, there's precious few Pis available to end users. So much so that out of 30M a year the Pi foundation decided to allocate an extra 100k for end users, which did improve availability, but still it's clear that most production is going to corporate partners and not end users.
    - imhoguy 4y ago
      30M RPis per year? Fascinating, I wonder what kind of products they ship with RPis inside.
sschueller 4y ago
If you have a little patience you can get a pi at MSRP from official retailers which have their stock listed here: https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/ You can also use my telegram bot https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot which will send you a message as soon as the one you want is in stock. I just got myself a CM4 a few days ago thanks to rpilocator.
- zmnd 4y ago
  I have been getting Rpilocator notifications for 6 months and wasn’t able to get a pi. If you start your order 15 seconds later you are basically out of luck. Same story for all my friends. So while I get that some people got lucky, it’s not a matter of “a little bit of patience”.
agloeregrets 4y ago
> There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi. This. I replaced my Homebridge/PiHole RasPi 4B 4GB with a J4125 Acer Desktop system at a cost of $88, all in with all accessories needed from ebay. It has 4GB of upgradable ram, a reasonable SSD, 1G ethernet, and a bonus Sata port for a NAS. It even included a power supply! Pihole's web UI is shockingly faster for me too. Edit: Link to system, price went up a little, still better than a Pi. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=item3b6a542023:g:MQ0AAOSwYe1hby9b&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAAkCDwKNs0ibI0WHKuXH4NgNJr6VZtM1EJmktz2da3Buc3qLwzKhjuutB1ZMW6er7oX2%2B8lnESZphmhD02OkTowhao6MS5t2HR%2FzGrhDikZ5mLFqhNO%2FAQztCenBOMGYlNl%2FSZ%2Faa9JaQyhv0ZQB8UFXyD2pb79%2BM93Bwb0r01h8w%2Bwfd76etqbtfHtpTLmdwACg%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7yO7efBYQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=i...
- kyriakos 4y ago
  What's the power usage difference compared to a pi? Considering this is something running 24/7?
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    Many of these mini PCs use 6-10W at idle, compared to 2-4W for a Pi, or 3-4W for the Rock 5 mentioned in the article.
  - agloeregrets 4y ago
    I don't have it on a kill-a-watt even though I should. As the person below you said, it's like 1.5 to 2x power consumption vs a pi4 at idle (Under 10w), but that is still comically small amounts, about the same as a Google Nest Hub.
  - BackBlast 4y ago
    If you get an atom line CPU a smaller I/O suite. Say a dell 3040 or 5070 and your at 4W idle - similar to the Rock5 (and cheaper if you're buying used on ebay). When you get to the full fledged core lines you're looking at 8-10W as a baseline. My Pi4, when I was running one, was 2-4 Watt @ idle. If you really want to deep dive on this topic see parky towers https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
celestialcheese 4y ago
It's really wild. NUCs and other mini PC's from HP/Dell are _so_ much better at similar if not cheaper prices. My theory is that, despite the economics for using Pi's completely flipping to making it a ridiculous decision for most applications, the decade+ of tutorials, Youtube videos, forum posts, github READMEs, etc all describe using Raspberry Pi's as the way to deploy XYZ open source project is enough of a "moat" that it just keeps the demand high enough to suck up supply. Also I don't think that people realize how good 3-5 year old technology is relative to the price. There's definitely a great arb there right now, and I think it's just going to get better. The Raspberry Pi brand is wildly strong, but it's eroded for me because of scalpers and lack of availability - hopefully they can right the ship before it's tainted for good.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > NUCs and other mini PC's from HP/Dell are _so_ much better at similar if not cheaper prices. > the decade+ of tutorials, Youtube videos, forum posts, github READMEs, etc While this doesn't apply so much to mini x86 PCs, most random ARM SBCs have hit or miss software support, as Jeff mentions in the article. Admittedly, I would prefer a RPI over whatever board this article was about, if I could get one for (near) MSRP. Part of it is the price, a "$35" computer is cheap enough to fry it making a mistake, or permanently lock it in a box as a camera controller in the garage, or whatever project idea requires... then buy more for the next project. A lot of RPI tutorials treat it more like a software appliance, where you run one thing on the device, and if you want to run a second thing you use a second RPI - more like a Linux-based microcontroller than a server. Thats only possible at the $35 price point. I have a used PC that I use as a server at home for a few things, running a 2015 i5 chip. I would never use it to just run one thing, or lock it up with a project. It basically has to sit in my house, hosting a bunch of things at once. Meanwhile I've been buying a handful of Pis since 2015, and I have them scattered over the house... one controlling smarthome stuff, one controlling the 3D printer... one in the garage... etc.
kube-system 4y ago
> The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL The article literally says the opposite. > Assuming Pis ever become available at MSRP again—and right now that still feels a long way off
- VLM 4y ago
  I'd say its pretending in the sense of comparing a vaporware product you'll never receive or only available for hyperinflated price from scalpers, vs delivered from Amazon Prime on your doorstep tomorrow. Like comparing a Chevy Volt on the used car lot that I could buy tonight vs a hypothetical Tesla concept car with an anticipated delivery date of 2026. I'm sure the vaporware has better specs but its not "fair" to pretend to compare them. But, you are in a sense technically correct on a small scale, yes.
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    The Rock 5 also takes a while to ship right now (I was in an early batch of pre-orders), and the Pi 4 is available at MSRP for either the lucky or the patient. Using rpilocator.com and notifications, most people I know who wanted to buy one have been able to find a 2, 4, or even 8 GB Pi 4. CM4 are much harder to find though. Hopefully that changes this year, but from what I've heard it will take longer for some reason :(
    - apple4ever 4y ago
      > Pi 4 is available at MSRP for either the lucky or the patient So basically not available. And as you said CM4's are impossible to get. I have one I ordered two years ago.
omnipath 4y ago
No, the article does not. I just rtfa and even Jeff is stating that once you pass the $100, you're in a different class altogether, and are competing with used mini pcs. He even mentions that trying to get a pi at MSRP isn't likely to happen any time soon, so even if we were to compare a $35 MSRP board to $150 board, the pi still has 2 advantages, cheaper price point (assuming MSRP PIs are available), and working software.
giantg2 4y ago
I wouldn't call it a dead market for Pi. I would say that the demand by some people has push out others (like me). I'm not buying a Pi for $100 or whatever, assuming it's even in stock. I ended up buying a mini PC for about $110 2 years ago, a refurbished desktop with decent specs for $120 last year, and using ESP32s for some of the smaller projects they can handle. Nothing against Pi. I have some older models and their great. Just the market availability and price gouging makes them impractical right now.
c2h5oh 4y ago
Depends on which one you are looking for - Pico/Pico W is readily available here around 7-7.5 euro (excluding vat) - so close to MSRP.
sliken 4y ago
Not sure why there's so much focus on the Pi and it's availability, that's not what the article is about. The article is about the RK3588, it's a substantial upgrade in CPU performance, I/O performance, and network performance over the PI4. It also connects things directly to a much faster PCIe instead of relying on USB connected chips. I think of the Pi4 as popular, but a toy. I compiled either rust or go (I did both, so I forget) 7 times faster than a 8GB ram Pi4 with my rk3588. It's really in a different class than the Pi4. The rk3588 is in the order it today, get it this week type availability. I found it for sale in 3 places, 2 with ship times of 2 weeks, 1 with a get it the day after tomorrow. MiniPCs are in the similar class, but compared to a $120 rk3588 with 8GB ram are often a bit lacking. Often MiniPCs are used, less than 8GB ram, don't have two 2.5G ethernet, require a custom wall wart+barrel connector, often have a fan, are usually in a cheap/plastic case (instead of a CNC machined case with integrated heat sink for $20), and in a much larger case. My case is 3.75" x 2.75" x 1" or so. So yes, you can get a used MiniPC, maybe you don't mind missing a 2nd ethernet port, and sure you can buy more storage/ram. But for the size and power efficiency it's going to be hard to match. I suspect the x86 in the $120-$140 range (with 8GB of ram) are going to be slower, but I'm hoping someone posts some benchmarks to compare.

by VLM 4y ago

mb7733 4y ago

> The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. What is your definition of a dead market?

dragontamer 4y ago
Nobody drives downtown anymore, the traffic is just too terrible!
VLM 4y ago
Not for new designs, milking .edu and .gov for all they can get, great specs but no delivery date, easier and more convenient to buy weed than their silicon ... it had a good run but it's just done now.
dsr_ 4y ago
I'm not sure I would call it "dead". "Generally available" means that I can order one or a dozen today for MSRP or less and get a shipping date between "today" and "end of the week". "In demand" means that I can order one today for a little over MSRP or look around for a sale to get one under, but I might not be able to find a single supplier who wants to sell me a dozen at once. "Speculation bubble" means that I can't find anyone to sell me one at MSRP without going to ridiculous lengths like setting bots out to scoop the competition, and I certainly can't call a distributor to get a dozen at MSRP -- but if I'm willing to pay a high premium, I can buy one today. I think RPi4 is in a speculation bubble.
mardifoufs 4y ago
Kind of dead for hobbyists, I'd say. Pi's used to be a super low budget, easily accessible computing platform, which is what made it so great for almost every project that needed more than an arduino. Now it's usually the hardest part to get, and the complete opposite of a "throwaway" computer that you can stick everywhere. I'm sure the pricing doesn't bother enterprise or industrial users, and the Pi Foundation is almost entirely devoted to catering to them. But hobbyists are super sensitive to pricing and ease of access, and the only reason to still use it is that tons of projects are already built to run on Pi's. Even then, Units are almost entirely allocated to enterprise/b2b demand, so the retail customer market is so extremely undersupplied that it's just not worth actively hunting for days just to run an interesting app you wanted to tinker with.

mindcrime 4y ago

The market for Pi is dead. The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL but I just checked Amazon and real humans are paying $170 to $205 for a pi. That's a temporary situation though. The RPi foundation folks have said the expect supply to be back to normal sometime this year.

VLM 4y ago
Its been the same credibility gap from those people since the unobtainable $5 Pi Zero back in 2015. Eight years and many models later they still don't ship at MSRP despite what they claim. However, their competition can and does ship on time what they advertise at MSRP. Its like two different marketplaces.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  I don't see them as having any major credibility gap personally. Until the crazy chipageddon stuff started (which, BTW, affected the entire industry) I was routinely to buy Raspbery Pi 4 Model B boards at (approximately) MSRP. Same for the Pi 3 before that. Call me crazy, but I don't have any problem believing that things will get back to normal soon, and that Pi's of various sorts will indeed return to MSRP, or very near MSRP.
- sliken 4y ago
  They do ship at MSRP, to a large number of corporate partners that embed the Pi in their products. Apparently at the rate of 30M per year. However much like the bitcoin miners who slurped up the GPUs for years, there's precious few Pis available to end users. So much so that out of 30M a year the Pi foundation decided to allocate an extra 100k for end users, which did improve availability, but still it's clear that most production is going to corporate partners and not end users.
  - imhoguy 4y ago
    30M RPis per year? Fascinating, I wonder what kind of products they ship with RPis inside.

sschueller 4y ago

If you have a little patience you can get a pi at MSRP from official retailers which have their stock listed here: https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/ You can also use my telegram bot https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot https://github.com/sschueller/rpilocatorbot which will send you a message as soon as the one you want is in stock. I just got myself a CM4 a few days ago thanks to rpilocator.

zmnd 4y ago
I have been getting Rpilocator notifications for 6 months and wasn’t able to get a pi. If you start your order 15 seconds later you are basically out of luck. Same story for all my friends. So while I get that some people got lucky, it’s not a matter of “a little bit of patience”.

agloeregrets 4y ago

> There are plenty of low performance PC compatibles from Beelink and similar places that cost less delivered tomorrow than a Pi delivered tomorrow AND have higher performance specs than a legacy Pi. This. I replaced my Homebridge/PiHole RasPi 4B 4GB with a J4125 Acer Desktop system at a cost of $88, all in with all accessories needed from ebay. It has 4GB of upgradable ram, a reasonable SSD, 1G ethernet, and a bonus Sata port for a NAS. It even included a power supply! Pihole's web UI is shockingly faster for me too. Edit: Link to system, price went up a little, still better than a Pi. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=item3b6a542023:g:MQ0AAOSwYe1hby9b&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAAkCDwKNs0ibI0WHKuXH4NgNJr6VZtM1EJmktz2da3Buc3qLwzKhjuutB1ZMW6er7oX2%2B8lnESZphmhD02OkTowhao6MS5t2HR%2FzGrhDikZ5mLFqhNO%2FAQztCenBOMGYlNl%2FSZ%2Faa9JaQyhv0ZQB8UFXyD2pb79%2BM93Bwb0r01h8w%2Bwfd76etqbtfHtpTLmdwACg%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7yO7efBYQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/255186968611?epid=8048445783&hash=i...

kyriakos 4y ago
What's the power usage difference compared to a pi? Considering this is something running 24/7?
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Many of these mini PCs use 6-10W at idle, compared to 2-4W for a Pi, or 3-4W for the Rock 5 mentioned in the article.
- agloeregrets 4y ago
  I don't have it on a kill-a-watt even though I should. As the person below you said, it's like 1.5 to 2x power consumption vs a pi4 at idle (Under 10w), but that is still comically small amounts, about the same as a Google Nest Hub.
- BackBlast 4y ago
  If you get an atom line CPU a smaller I/O suite. Say a dell 3040 or 5070 and your at 4W idle - similar to the Rock5 (and cheaper if you're buying used on ebay). When you get to the full fledged core lines you're looking at 8-10W as a baseline. My Pi4, when I was running one, was 2-4 Watt @ idle. If you really want to deep dive on this topic see parky towers https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

celestialcheese 4y ago

It's really wild. NUCs and other mini PC's from HP/Dell are _so_ much better at similar if not cheaper prices. My theory is that, despite the economics for using Pi's completely flipping to making it a ridiculous decision for most applications, the decade+ of tutorials, Youtube videos, forum posts, github READMEs, etc all describe using Raspberry Pi's as the way to deploy XYZ open source project is enough of a "moat" that it just keeps the demand high enough to suck up supply. Also I don't think that people realize how good 3-5 year old technology is relative to the price. There's definitely a great arb there right now, and I think it's just going to get better. The Raspberry Pi brand is wildly strong, but it's eroded for me because of scalpers and lack of availability - hopefully they can right the ship before it's tainted for good.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> NUCs and other mini PC's from HP/Dell are _so_ much better at similar if not cheaper prices. > the decade+ of tutorials, Youtube videos, forum posts, github READMEs, etc While this doesn't apply so much to mini x86 PCs, most random ARM SBCs have hit or miss software support, as Jeff mentions in the article. Admittedly, I would prefer a RPI over whatever board this article was about, if I could get one for (near) MSRP. Part of it is the price, a "$35" computer is cheap enough to fry it making a mistake, or permanently lock it in a box as a camera controller in the garage, or whatever project idea requires... then buy more for the next project. A lot of RPI tutorials treat it more like a software appliance, where you run one thing on the device, and if you want to run a second thing you use a second RPI - more like a Linux-based microcontroller than a server. Thats only possible at the $35 price point. I have a used PC that I use as a server at home for a few things, running a 2015 i5 chip. I would never use it to just run one thing, or lock it up with a project. It basically has to sit in my house, hosting a bunch of things at once. Meanwhile I've been buying a handful of Pis since 2015, and I have them scattered over the house... one controlling smarthome stuff, one controlling the 3D printer... one in the garage... etc.

kube-system 4y ago

> The article pretends that you can buy a pi for list price $5 or whatever LOL The article literally says the opposite. > Assuming Pis ever become available at MSRP again—and right now that still feels a long way off

VLM 4y ago
I'd say its pretending in the sense of comparing a vaporware product you'll never receive or only available for hyperinflated price from scalpers, vs delivered from Amazon Prime on your doorstep tomorrow. Like comparing a Chevy Volt on the used car lot that I could buy tonight vs a hypothetical Tesla concept car with an anticipated delivery date of 2026. I'm sure the vaporware has better specs but its not "fair" to pretend to compare them. But, you are in a sense technically correct on a small scale, yes.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  The Rock 5 also takes a while to ship right now (I was in an early batch of pre-orders), and the Pi 4 is available at MSRP for either the lucky or the patient. Using rpilocator.com and notifications, most people I know who wanted to buy one have been able to find a 2, 4, or even 8 GB Pi 4. CM4 are much harder to find though. Hopefully that changes this year, but from what I've heard it will take longer for some reason :(
  - apple4ever 4y ago
    > Pi 4 is available at MSRP for either the lucky or the patient So basically not available. And as you said CM4's are impossible to get. I have one I ordered two years ago.

omnipath 4y ago

No, the article does not. I just rtfa and even Jeff is stating that once you pass the $100, you're in a different class altogether, and are competing with used mini pcs. He even mentions that trying to get a pi at MSRP isn't likely to happen any time soon, so even if we were to compare a $35 MSRP board to $150 board, the pi still has 2 advantages, cheaper price point (assuming MSRP PIs are available), and working software.

giantg2 4y ago

I wouldn't call it a dead market for Pi. I would say that the demand by some people has push out others (like me). I'm not buying a Pi for $100 or whatever, assuming it's even in stock. I ended up buying a mini PC for about $110 2 years ago, a refurbished desktop with decent specs for $120 last year, and using ESP32s for some of the smaller projects they can handle. Nothing against Pi. I have some older models and their great. Just the market availability and price gouging makes them impractical right now.

c2h5oh 4y ago

Depends on which one you are looking for - Pico/Pico W is readily available here around 7-7.5 euro (excluding vat) - so close to MSRP.

sliken 4y ago

Not sure why there's so much focus on the Pi and it's availability, that's not what the article is about. The article is about the RK3588, it's a substantial upgrade in CPU performance, I/O performance, and network performance over the PI4. It also connects things directly to a much faster PCIe instead of relying on USB connected chips. I think of the Pi4 as popular, but a toy. I compiled either rust or go (I did both, so I forget) 7 times faster than a 8GB ram Pi4 with my rk3588. It's really in a different class than the Pi4. The rk3588 is in the order it today, get it this week type availability. I found it for sale in 3 places, 2 with ship times of 2 weeks, 1 with a get it the day after tomorrow. MiniPCs are in the similar class, but compared to a $120 rk3588 with 8GB ram are often a bit lacking. Often MiniPCs are used, less than 8GB ram, don't have two 2.5G ethernet, require a custom wall wart+barrel connector, often have a fan, are usually in a cheap/plastic case (instead of a CNC machined case with integrated heat sink for $20), and in a much larger case. My case is 3.75" x 2.75" x 1" or so. So yes, you can get a used MiniPC, maybe you don't mind missing a 2nd ethernet port, and sure you can buy more storage/ram. But for the size and power efficiency it's going to be hard to match. I suspect the x86 in the $120-$140 range (with 8GB of ram) are going to be slower, but I'm hoping someone posts some benchmarks to compare.