7 ms·

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton Discusses Stock Updates, Industry Prioritization

57 points by WithinReason 3y ago

Timon3 3y ago
> Some members of the community have been vocal in their disappointment with stock levels, some even stating that they are switching away from the Raspberry Pi. Upton believes that the anger is completely understandable and that it was the "single hardest decision I've ever had to make in my business career[.]" Upton continues "It's extremely hard to decide when you are a hobbyist, as I am, and you built this thing (Raspberry Pi) for hobbyists and education, to prioritize a different market (industrial customers). > Upton then explains that OEM customers are mainly 3,000 boards per year, with between one to ten employees who build some specific product using the Raspberry Pi and cannot use an alternative SBC. If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". Upton then explains "So the real question, when people are saying, 'Should you do this prioritization call?' is 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?'. It didn't feel like the moral thing to do." > Upton then explains that it felt like Raspberry Pi were doing the right thing, or hoped that community members would give them the benefit of the doubt. But Upton is aware that some members will be permanently disgruntled. Upton clarifies the misconceptions that Raspberry Pi are not making boards, they are, they are just not making enough. The second misconception being that Raspberry Pi are favoring large customers (Upton uses IBM as an example) over the communtiy, when in reality it is the smaller OEM customers who are the median customer base. Upton concludes by saying that they are looking forward to now making that judgment call anymore. Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous.
- shapefrog 3y ago
  I set out to save the world, but then a corporation that was built on my product, because it was much cheaper for them than the alternative, said they would make less profit if they didnt get all of my product. Morally I had to support the corporation at that point.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    That's a great translation of the corporate message
- mavhc 3y ago
  Why is it ridiculous? The top 2 uses of hobby Raspberry Pis is to sit in a drawer, or play tv shows you downloaded off the internet, that's the easiest market to switch to an alternative.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    Mind sharing your statistics on hobby RasPi usage? It would be interesting to see just how many just sit in a drawer. If it's a ridiculous number you might change my opinion on this! :)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > The top 2 uses of hobby Raspberry Pis is to sit in a drawer, or play tv shows you downloaded off the internet If that's true, I wonder why the market hasn't corrected. With the prices Pis have had lately, I would expect them to go from drawers to ebay quickly.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > If that's true, I wonder why the market hasn't corrected. With the prices Pis have had lately, I would expect them to go from drawers to ebay quickly. My personal explanations (I do believe there is a grain of truth in each of them, but you have to take them all together to get an explanation): - A lot of the RPi boards that lie around in the drawers are older versions in which many buyers are less interested. - Many buyers are hesitant to buy used RPis because something might be broken with them; this risk (and attempting to get a refund) is not worth the trouble. - In countries where there are complicated taxation laws and strong(er) customer protection laws, many hobbyists do not consider it to be worth the (felt) potential legal trouble to put their RPis on eBay.
- rwmj 3y ago
  I don't even understand why its an either-or. Can't they treat the hobbyist market as another pseudo-commercial user, assigning blocks of boards to sell to hobbyist distributors?
  - detaro 3y ago
    Isn't that what they are doing? Pis do keep popping up briefly at various distributors, just not in the numbers needed to keep them in stock consistently.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      This has been going on for years now; I don't understand why can't the supply be ramped up to match demand. Is this the chip shortage thing again?
      - detaro 3y ago
        Again? Still. Getting parts has been nasty the past few years. (I think my favorite was the supplier that basically said "well, I can prioritize your order if you buy 10k units. Then I can get 500 to you in 6 months. Of course you need to pay for all 10k now. No, I can't tell you when we'll be able to deliver the entire 10k, might be a few years") I don't think they've talked about what their specific constraint is, but given their SoC supply afaik is still entirely dependent on Broadcom I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom basically said "ok, you can have X units this quarter" and that's that. Not like RPi can easily replace Broadcom and not like Broadcom doesn't have demand from other potentially more important customers to meet.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous. A potential mitigation that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could have done: commercial users can get prioritized RPi boards, but they have to pay an insane mark-up for this priotization (say 200 € instead of 50 € for a board). This way, corporations for which otherwise the production chains would stand still (i.e. much larger financial losses) can get a solution, but a solution that is not cheap. This solution should appease many hobbyists, since this way they don't feel that commercial users "buy away the RPis, which were originally developed for hobbyists and schools", but rather that such commercial users rather subsidize the RPis for the hobbysist and schools via the "priotization mark-ups". EDIT: Under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999824 cinntaile posted a related consideration.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    That's a lovely idea and would have definitely kept me as a happy hobbyist.
  - sheepybloke 3y ago
    This makes a lot of sense to me, and I think the biggest thing is this changes the conversation at a company level about which boards to buy. Generally, companies have a lot more resources to put towards supporting more niche commercial boards, like generating their own BSPs and Linux builds. They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies. I do believe there exist further points that make the Raspberry Pi boards attractive to companies (in opposite to SBC offers by many other companies): c) There exist a lot of people (potential empoloyees) who have already worked with a RPi (even if for private projects) and thus know RPi's insides rather well. d) The RPi boards (even very old ones) are supported by the manufacturer for a very long time with GNU/Linux support that (mostly) "simply works". e) The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British company (in opposite to boards by Chinese producers) Potentially: f) The esteemed Raspberry Pi brand might also give some martketing prestige to an offering of a company that uses a RPi board as a central part ("Our product uses a Raspberry Pi").
pyb 3y ago
I still can't make sense of his decision to favour SME customers. Someone who needs 3000 units a year is more likely to have the resources to redesign around a different SBC, than someone who orders a couple RPis a year.
- sjg 3y ago
  He touches on it here in this interview with Jeff G - https://youtu.be/-_aL9V0JsQQ?t=564 https://youtu.be/-_aL9V0JsQQ?t=564
  - adamors 3y ago
    The article is about this video interview, it even links to it
- detaro 3y ago
  Someone who orders only a couple a year is probably not loosing a lot of money from not being able to or having a harder time getting them. Even if it's commercial, 5/y is probably more in the realm of a few individually customized setups. Whereas if you have a complete product designed around an SBC, respinning that is expensive, and a few hundred to a few thousand units is an ugly point where that leads to really high per-unit costs. Whereas if you make millions of a thing, the overall development cost is similar, but spreads over many more units. (EDIT: you also probably aren't using an SBC, for similar-ish reasons: a customized board is saving you money per-unit, and millions is enough to amortize the up-front cost of that and still come out ahead) So the economic perspective IMHO makes a lot of sense.
  - pipo234 3y ago
    So his rationale is: 3000/y is big enough to have a real business around, yet too small to invest in alternative SBC?
    - pyb 3y ago
      People get into incredible mental contorsions to justify helping one customer who should really be able to find alternatives, over helping 1000+ customers who cannot.
cinntaile 3y ago
Why don't they make an industry rPi where they charge 10x what the consumer version costs? It sounds like there is a huge market for that.
- gavaw 3y ago
  The rpi is not unique enough (or even unique at all) to be able to get away with doing something like that.
  - shapefrog 3y ago
    > If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?' The CEO of Raspberry Pi disagrees with you.
    - gavaw 3y ago
      Of course the CEO of %company% is going to say that %company_product% is absolutely unique and irreplaceable. The truth is that browsing through alibaba proves him wrong, fast. All he has is a trademark (which is extremely valuable, don't get me wrong).
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > The truth is that browsing through alibaba proves him wrong, fast. Where can I find a SBC on Alibaba that uses the same SoC as some Raspberry Pi?
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  thats the compute module.
  - detaro 3y ago
    not really, no. It's neither at a massive premium nor the only thing available for commercial customers.
bmitc 3y ago
There's really not much point to Raspberry Pi's anymore, in my opinion. Their performance is so bad that they are terrible for general purpose computing. For embedded use cases, they are power hungry and lack features.
- elcomet 3y ago
  This is not the point of the raspberry pi. It is to provide a very cheap computer for developing countries so that they can access online ressources and education. What alternative do you see?
  - shapefrog 3y ago
    This is not the point of the raspberry pi. It is to provide a very cheap computer for companies so that they can access more money.
  - hydroid7 3y ago
    Haha, that's a good one. The market for Pis is the industry since long time ago.
  - achates 3y ago
    Phones fill this niche in the third world.
    - snovv_crash 3y ago
      Phones are pure consumption devices. You can't make apps for phones on phones.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    > The object of the charity is to further the advancement of education of adults and children, particularly in the field of Computers, Computer Science and related subjects That is the purpose of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the registered charity in the UK. I'm not sure how that fits with having so many non-educational customers. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?subid=0&regid=1129409 https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...
pmontra 3y ago
> Pi Zero W is in stock across Europe, as are the Raspberry Pi 3A+. Fact check on the two Italian resellers linked from Raspberry's site https://www.kubii.com/it/40-le-schede-raspberry-pi https://www.kubii.com/it/40-le-schede-raspberry-pi they have the Zero W, the 3A+ Pis are out of stock https://www.melopero.com/categoria-prodotto/raspberry-pi/boards/ https://www.melopero.com/categoria-prodotto/raspberry-pi/boa... same as above
andrewstuart 3y ago
Raspberry Pi computers are hard to get, expensive and slow, now at least one maybe two generations behind competitors in terms of speed. Upton claims that these companies had to use Raspberry Pi…. sounds false to me - lots of other companies changed their designs to handle the shortage. If anything, Upton should have backed kids and schools above all - they are the one who really needed hobby computing during Covid lockdowns. Upton's justifications don’t ring true. Also the company has treated hobbyists, kids and schools like garbage. Buy something else.
- achr2 3y ago
  “Won’t you think of the poor corporations!” That’s a new one for me. I would find it a lot less condescending to be told a straight “this made us the most money” reasoning. Anything else is obviously BS or incompetence.
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  What are some good alternatives to raspberry pi for hobby use? Edit: here's a recent Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976965
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    Odroid comes to mind
  - detaro 3y ago
    BananaPi, OrangePi, Odroid, NanoPi, Radxa would be some of the more well-known names. If you just need "something that runs Linux" pretty much everything qualifies, if you have more specific needs it comes down to comparing in detail... On the other hand, you can also find things serving needs that Pis don't cover so well (e.g. multiple Ethernet interfaces, SATA, ...)
    - tjoff 3y ago
      > OP links the Banana Pi M5, VIM1s, Odroid C4, Rock 3A, and the Orange Pi 5 4GB as potential alternatives, but the hardware is not the problem, it's the software support and the community. I'm curious if you've found any SBCs out there that might be viable alternatives to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. From the linked Ask HN. Hardware is irrelevant if the software isn't comparable. I'd like to be proven wrong but if nothing has changed in the last years there are no real alternatives to the Pi.
shrx 3y ago
The industry should only ever be prioritized for purchasing the Compute modules. Regular Pis should always be for end users only.
drumhead 3y ago
Are there good low cost options to the PI? I haven't seen any gain traction or market share.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  pine64's boards?
flyinghamster 3y ago
The general lack of anything Raspberry Pi is having knock-on effects as well. The lower-end mini-PCs (NUC, etc.) are completely gone at my MicroCenter. Only the mid/top-tier minis are still around. Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine. Additionally, unfortunately there does not exist a version of the Raspberry Pi 400 with 8 GiB of RAM.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
I lost interest and trust in Raspberry the moment they did this: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbu0t1/microsoft_repo_installed_on_all_raspberry_pis/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbu0t1/microsoft_rep...

57 points by WithinReason 3y ago

> Some members of the community have been vocal in their disappointment with stock levels, some even stating that they are switching away from the Raspberry Pi. Upton believes that the anger is completely understandable and that it was the "single hardest decision I've ever had to make in my business career[.]" Upton continues "It's extremely hard to decide when you are a hobbyist, as I am, and you built this thing (Raspberry Pi) for hobbyists and education, to prioritize a different market (industrial customers). > Upton then explains that OEM customers are mainly 3,000 boards per year, with between one to ten employees who build some specific product using the Raspberry Pi and cannot use an alternative SBC. If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". Upton then explains "So the real question, when people are saying, 'Should you do this prioritization call?' is 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?'. It didn't feel like the moral thing to do." > Upton then explains that it felt like Raspberry Pi were doing the right thing, or hoped that community members would give them the benefit of the doubt. But Upton is aware that some members will be permanently disgruntled. Upton clarifies the misconceptions that Raspberry Pi are not making boards, they are, they are just not making enough. The second misconception being that Raspberry Pi are favoring large customers (Upton uses IBM as an example) over the communtiy, when in reality it is the smaller OEM customers who are the median customer base. Upton concludes by saying that they are looking forward to now making that judgment call anymore. Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous.

shapefrog 3y ago
I set out to save the world, but then a corporation that was built on my product, because it was much cheaper for them than the alternative, said they would make less profit if they didnt get all of my product. Morally I had to support the corporation at that point.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  That's a great translation of the corporate message
mavhc 3y ago
Why is it ridiculous? The top 2 uses of hobby Raspberry Pis is to sit in a drawer, or play tv shows you downloaded off the internet, that's the easiest market to switch to an alternative.
- Timon3 3y ago
  Mind sharing your statistics on hobby RasPi usage? It would be interesting to see just how many just sit in a drawer. If it's a ridiculous number you might change my opinion on this! :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > The top 2 uses of hobby Raspberry Pis is to sit in a drawer, or play tv shows you downloaded off the internet If that's true, I wonder why the market hasn't corrected. With the prices Pis have had lately, I would expect them to go from drawers to ebay quickly.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > If that's true, I wonder why the market hasn't corrected. With the prices Pis have had lately, I would expect them to go from drawers to ebay quickly. My personal explanations (I do believe there is a grain of truth in each of them, but you have to take them all together to get an explanation): - A lot of the RPi boards that lie around in the drawers are older versions in which many buyers are less interested. - Many buyers are hesitant to buy used RPis because something might be broken with them; this risk (and attempting to get a refund) is not worth the trouble. - In countries where there are complicated taxation laws and strong(er) customer protection laws, many hobbyists do not consider it to be worth the (felt) potential legal trouble to put their RPis on eBay.
rwmj 3y ago
I don't even understand why its an either-or. Can't they treat the hobbyist market as another pseudo-commercial user, assigning blocks of boards to sell to hobbyist distributors?
- detaro 3y ago
  Isn't that what they are doing? Pis do keep popping up briefly at various distributors, just not in the numbers needed to keep them in stock consistently.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    This has been going on for years now; I don't understand why can't the supply be ramped up to match demand. Is this the chip shortage thing again?
    - detaro 3y ago
      Again? Still. Getting parts has been nasty the past few years. (I think my favorite was the supplier that basically said "well, I can prioritize your order if you buy 10k units. Then I can get 500 to you in 6 months. Of course you need to pay for all 10k now. No, I can't tell you when we'll be able to deliver the entire 10k, might be a few years") I don't think they've talked about what their specific constraint is, but given their SoC supply afaik is still entirely dependent on Broadcom I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom basically said "ok, you can have X units this quarter" and that's that. Not like RPi can easily replace Broadcom and not like Broadcom doesn't have demand from other potentially more important customers to meet.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous. A potential mitigation that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could have done: commercial users can get prioritized RPi boards, but they have to pay an insane mark-up for this priotization (say 200 € instead of 50 € for a board). This way, corporations for which otherwise the production chains would stand still (i.e. much larger financial losses) can get a solution, but a solution that is not cheap. This solution should appease many hobbyists, since this way they don't feel that commercial users "buy away the RPis, which were originally developed for hobbyists and schools", but rather that such commercial users rather subsidize the RPis for the hobbysist and schools via the "priotization mark-ups". EDIT: Under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999824 cinntaile posted a related consideration.
- Timon3 3y ago
  That's a lovely idea and would have definitely kept me as a happy hobbyist.
- sheepybloke 3y ago
  This makes a lot of sense to me, and I think the biggest thing is this changes the conversation at a company level about which boards to buy. Generally, companies have a lot more resources to put towards supporting more niche commercial boards, like generating their own BSPs and Linux builds. They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies. I do believe there exist further points that make the Raspberry Pi boards attractive to companies (in opposite to SBC offers by many other companies): c) There exist a lot of people (potential empoloyees) who have already worked with a RPi (even if for private projects) and thus know RPi's insides rather well. d) The RPi boards (even very old ones) are supported by the manufacturer for a very long time with GNU/Linux support that (mostly) "simply works". e) The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British company (in opposite to boards by Chinese producers) Potentially: f) The esteemed Raspberry Pi brand might also give some martketing prestige to an offering of a company that uses a RPi board as a central part ("Our product uses a Raspberry Pi").

pyb 3y ago

I still can't make sense of his decision to favour SME customers. Someone who needs 3000 units a year is more likely to have the resources to redesign around a different SBC, than someone who orders a couple RPis a year.

sjg 3y ago
He touches on it here in this interview with Jeff G - https://youtu.be/-_aL9V0JsQQ?t=564 https://youtu.be/-_aL9V0JsQQ?t=564
- adamors 3y ago
  The article is about this video interview, it even links to it
detaro 3y ago
Someone who orders only a couple a year is probably not loosing a lot of money from not being able to or having a harder time getting them. Even if it's commercial, 5/y is probably more in the realm of a few individually customized setups. Whereas if you have a complete product designed around an SBC, respinning that is expensive, and a few hundred to a few thousand units is an ugly point where that leads to really high per-unit costs. Whereas if you make millions of a thing, the overall development cost is similar, but spreads over many more units. (EDIT: you also probably aren't using an SBC, for similar-ish reasons: a customized board is saving you money per-unit, and millions is enough to amortize the up-front cost of that and still come out ahead) So the economic perspective IMHO makes a lot of sense.
- pipo234 3y ago
  So his rationale is: 3000/y is big enough to have a real business around, yet too small to invest in alternative SBC?
  - pyb 3y ago
    People get into incredible mental contorsions to justify helping one customer who should really be able to find alternatives, over helping 1000+ customers who cannot.

cinntaile 3y ago

Why don't they make an industry rPi where they charge 10x what the consumer version costs? It sounds like there is a huge market for that.

gavaw 3y ago
The rpi is not unique enough (or even unique at all) to be able to get away with doing something like that.
- shapefrog 3y ago
  > If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?' The CEO of Raspberry Pi disagrees with you.
  - gavaw 3y ago
    Of course the CEO of %company% is going to say that %company_product% is absolutely unique and irreplaceable. The truth is that browsing through alibaba proves him wrong, fast. All he has is a trademark (which is extremely valuable, don't get me wrong).
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > The truth is that browsing through alibaba proves him wrong, fast. Where can I find a SBC on Alibaba that uses the same SoC as some Raspberry Pi?
KaiserPro 3y ago
thats the compute module.
- detaro 3y ago
  not really, no. It's neither at a massive premium nor the only thing available for commercial customers.

bmitc 3y ago

There's really not much point to Raspberry Pi's anymore, in my opinion. Their performance is so bad that they are terrible for general purpose computing. For embedded use cases, they are power hungry and lack features.

elcomet 3y ago
This is not the point of the raspberry pi. It is to provide a very cheap computer for developing countries so that they can access online ressources and education. What alternative do you see?
- shapefrog 3y ago
  This is not the point of the raspberry pi. It is to provide a very cheap computer for companies so that they can access more money.
- hydroid7 3y ago
  Haha, that's a good one. The market for Pis is the industry since long time ago.
- achates 3y ago
  Phones fill this niche in the third world.
  - snovv_crash 3y ago
    Phones are pure consumption devices. You can't make apps for phones on phones.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  > The object of the charity is to further the advancement of education of adults and children, particularly in the field of Computers, Computer Science and related subjects That is the purpose of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the registered charity in the UK. I'm not sure how that fits with having so many non-educational customers. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?subid=0&regid=1129409 https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...

pmontra 3y ago

> Pi Zero W is in stock across Europe, as are the Raspberry Pi 3A+. Fact check on the two Italian resellers linked from Raspberry's site https://www.kubii.com/it/40-le-schede-raspberry-pi https://www.kubii.com/it/40-le-schede-raspberry-pi they have the Zero W, the 3A+ Pis are out of stock https://www.melopero.com/categoria-prodotto/raspberry-pi/boards/ https://www.melopero.com/categoria-prodotto/raspberry-pi/boa... same as above

andrewstuart 3y ago

Raspberry Pi computers are hard to get, expensive and slow, now at least one maybe two generations behind competitors in terms of speed. Upton claims that these companies had to use Raspberry Pi…. sounds false to me - lots of other companies changed their designs to handle the shortage. If anything, Upton should have backed kids and schools above all - they are the one who really needed hobby computing during Covid lockdowns. Upton's justifications don’t ring true. Also the company has treated hobbyists, kids and schools like garbage. Buy something else.

achr2 3y ago
“Won’t you think of the poor corporations!” That’s a new one for me. I would find it a lot less condescending to be told a straight “this made us the most money” reasoning. Anything else is obviously BS or incompetence.
worldsayshi 3y ago
What are some good alternatives to raspberry pi for hobby use? Edit: here's a recent Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976965
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Odroid comes to mind
- detaro 3y ago
  BananaPi, OrangePi, Odroid, NanoPi, Radxa would be some of the more well-known names. If you just need "something that runs Linux" pretty much everything qualifies, if you have more specific needs it comes down to comparing in detail... On the other hand, you can also find things serving needs that Pis don't cover so well (e.g. multiple Ethernet interfaces, SATA, ...)
  - tjoff 3y ago
    > OP links the Banana Pi M5, VIM1s, Odroid C4, Rock 3A, and the Orange Pi 5 4GB as potential alternatives, but the hardware is not the problem, it's the software support and the community. I'm curious if you've found any SBCs out there that might be viable alternatives to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. From the linked Ask HN. Hardware is irrelevant if the software isn't comparable. I'd like to be proven wrong but if nothing has changed in the last years there are no real alternatives to the Pi.

shrx 3y ago

The industry should only ever be prioritized for purchasing the Compute modules. Regular Pis should always be for end users only.

drumhead 3y ago

Are there good low cost options to the PI? I haven't seen any gain traction or market share.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
pine64's boards?

flyinghamster 3y ago

The general lack of anything Raspberry Pi is having knock-on effects as well. The lower-end mini-PCs (NUC, etc.) are completely gone at my MicroCenter. Only the mid/top-tier minis are still around. Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine. Additionally, unfortunately there does not exist a version of the Raspberry Pi 400 with 8 GiB of RAM.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

I lost interest and trust in Raspberry the moment they did this: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbu0t1/microsoft_repo_installed_on_all_raspberry_pis/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbu0t1/microsoft_rep...