12 ms·

At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end

141 points by edward 3y ago

epolanski 3y ago
Any rumours of a 5?
- beebeepka 3y ago
  No need. The CEO said (in an interview with the "explaining computers" YouTube channel) 2023 will be about fixing supply of existing models. It's reasonable to expect the 5 to arrive in 2024 at the earliest. Personally, I wouldn't expect super fast m2 ports and whatnot. Frankly, at this point I am ready to spend a bit more and get a proper 5800u mini pc or something. Waiting for AMD's Zen 4 APUs to hit the market. They are not going to be cheap, though
  - sapiogram 3y ago
    > It's reasonable to expect the 5 to arrive in 2024 at the earliest My expectation is 2025 at the earliest, tbh. Mostly based on the CEO's repeated statements, and the complete lack of rumors about any developments. If a new lineup of PIs were going to launch next year, they'd have to be pretty late in development already.
  - RF_Savage 3y ago
    I wouldn't hold my breath for small AMD based boards. For example PC Engines (they make the APU and ALIX boards) has stated that AMD is increasingly difficult to work with as a small manufacturer. And all their old SoC's have been EOLed.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I really wish they would decide not to do it at all. Put all the high-performance work into the CM units of different specifications. Make (or encourage the market to continue to make) mainboards that take those units. Maybe certify a couple of them for the Foundation's use. And then focus on making microcontroller-level chips at different performance levels, up to an "alternative home computer" device. Something small, which can be learned completely. Enough power for something equivalent to a Minix or a CP/M or RISC OS. The RP2040 is almost there anyway.
    - cdcarter 3y ago
      I have always been slightly annoyed that the RP2040 didn't feature a RISC-V core to being with, with a 2nd gen that includes the privilege mode specification. RP2040 as it stands is nearly capable of being "learned completely" and providing something like an OS, but having a hardware MMU really makes a different experience. Of course, the ARM architecture has an MMU spec too, but I've got a soft spot for RISC-V.
- orra 3y ago
  Alas, no. “Don't expect a Pi 5 five next year,” Upton said [in December 2022], explaining that the Pi team sees 2023 as a year to spend “recovering from what just happened to all of us [COVID, supply chain issues].” https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    The raspberry pi becomes even more outdated....
    - Narishma 3y ago
      That was never a problem for them.
  - kytazo 3y ago
    I'm wondering why other manufacturers don't look like impacted as much from the covid supply chain disruptions as they pose to be in every given chance.
    - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
      I think it has to do with the fact that the majority of their product line is based on a few very specific SoCs that are quite hard to replace so fast.
marcomourao 3y ago
Excellent news. I just bought a Fujitsu thin client for €18.00 to scratch the Raspberry itch but will definitely try to get my hands on a Pi 4.
- theWreckluse 3y ago
  Can you run Linux on a thin client? Also where did you buy them for so cheap?
  - rvense 3y ago
    As far as I understand, most thin clients nowadays are just PCs, usually AMD embedded SoCs with very good support for Linux.
  - marcomourao 3y ago
    > Can you run Linux on a thin client? Yeah, these originally came preloaded with eLux. https://www.unicon.com/elux https://www.unicon.com/elux > Also where did you buy them for so cheap? Second hand on Ebay, I'm located in Europe.
  - awesometech 3y ago
    This person has had success with the idea: https://weisser-zwerg.dev/posts/dell-wyse-fujitsu-futro/ https://weisser-zwerg.dev/posts/dell-wyse-fujitsu-futro/
  - zh3 3y ago
    No problem running lightweight distros on them, though the really thin clients tend to be underpowered for web browsing. Available very cheaply on ebay, and pretty much all support remote boot so easy to run diskless (assuming some minimal local server).
- nmstoker 3y ago
  After the only ones being low spec for ages, there do seem to be some higher spec ones becoming available - I nabbed a Pi4 8Gb yesterday. No sign of Zero 2Ws yet though
kytazo 3y ago
Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you. On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that. I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything". With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.
  - mmastrac 3y ago
    The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.
euniceee3 3y ago
The shortage ruined the brand for me. Any sort of commercial product based on this cheap platform had supply issues, which caused a pivot. I had an old boss balk at me for suggesting we use Pi's back in 2013, I now see why. Glad to see the gouging finally come to an end!
- tjoff 3y ago
  How is that the brands fault? For better or worse they even prioritized commercial products despite it not being their core audience.
  - wittenbunk 3y ago
    How is the impact of the brands choices the fault of the brand? Did you forget an /s?
    - tjoff 3y ago
      Their choice can most certainly be questioned, but in this case the choice favored the use-case OP was talking about. So if anything it should have strengthened the brand image from that point of view.
    - euniceee3 3y ago
      It was mentioned as a footnote in the Dec 2022 update. Seems like a miss by the marketing team. My bad for missing this and only seeing the headlines.
  - euniceee3 3y ago
    This is the first I am hearing about the commercial support on this. I had no idea my EIN was so powerful. The brand in my mind is 100% hobby because if I was able to source enough for prototyping (which was not possible over the last 18 months without getting gouged) then sticking with tried and true platforms was the only path forward. Not trying to be cheeky, just surprised the prioritization for commercial products was not publicized more.
igou 3y ago
ARM SBC entry costs have jumped upwards of $100 and low powered Intel machines (used thin clients, nucs, workstations) have become more accessible than ever. When the 4 was brand new, 4 cores/4gb was pretty killer for the entry price. The Pi had an incredible impact but it's pretty obvious it doesn't fit very well into a lot of usecases any more given other options. I hope that over the next few years the Pi foundation can focus on its original goal for the Pi: a cheap and accessible device that could be used in schools to teach programming
- kytazo 3y ago
  Yes but when you compare the TDP and compute/watt of such a system compared to an arm sbc it pales in comparison. Being fan-less hence much more compact is another thing they lack as well.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    NUC and other platforms get down to single-digit watts idle. I have a much larger, very performant Ryzen 7 system that idles at 30 watts with an Nvidia GTX 1070. The GTX 1070 alone is 10w idle and tiny (under 1 sec) 70 watt peaks for inference in my various uses (the fan doesn't even start). The x86_64 architecture has come a long way in terms of energy usage and even the much older NUCs, thin clients, etc can pretty easily get to the 10 watt range. I'm not one for wasting energy but 30 watts at 24/7 usage at some of the highest energy costs in the world ($0.23/kWh) comes to roughly $5/mo and enables many, many, many things that just aren't fundamentally possible (or very ill-advised) with a Raspberry Pi. For me personally I'm more in the $0.12/kWh range and I can run this system, with a crazy amount of functionality, for around $3/mo. Yes a Raspberry Pi would be something like $0.26/mo but a few dollars a month is completely unnoticeable in a typical household utility bill. The level of your toaster or how long you microwave leftovers adds up to be significantly greater.
    - derefr 3y ago
      That's all fine if you're powering the thing off mains power. A lot of Pi use-cases involve running them on batteries, e.g. any of the Pi-powered "retro handheld" devices.
gedy 3y ago
I keep reading how "it'll get better soon" but still can't buy them like I used to. Looking forward to "here is the link you can buy today for low price". Feels a little marketing PR otherwise.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  I keep reading how "it'll get better soon" but still can't buy them like I used to. Their messaging has been consistent going back to at least sometime last year, from what I can tell: things will be tight at least through the end of Q2 2023 (albeit improving towards the end of that range) and will get much better through Q3 and Q4, with normal (pre-pandemic) availability by sometime in Q4. So far things seem to be tracking exactly along that path. Prices on the scalper-resold Pi 4's on Amazon started dropping precipitously about a month or so ago, and have dropped from north of $200 USD to around $120 USD (for the 8GB model). And rpilocator consistently shows far more availability of different models than it did a couple of months ago. Clearly we aren't "out of the woods" yet, but one can absolutely start to see the lights of civilization in the distance if you look. https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workstation/dp/B0899VXM8F/ https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workst...
awesometech 3y ago
I couldn't get them for use as ambiance devices so I bought some cheap Lenovo Ideapads, they work great.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  There are also the ThinkSmart View devices: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330
  - awesometech 3y ago
    Those look cool, I wasn't aware of them. I feel more comfortable with the laptops since they usually undergo a grueling test cycle at Lenovo. I hook them up to an external monitor which hides their presence and use a wireless air mouse to control them.
botanical 3y ago
I feel like the Raspberry Pi foundation hasn't met its objective of computers being accessible to everyone (eg. children). The Pi itself is prohibitively expensive, and it looks like they cater to companies first. Arduino and it open sourcing the hardware meant very cheap but less powerful SBCs. I hope to see something in a similar vein from them.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Until there was a chip shortage, they really did meet that obligation. The decision that nobody likes that they had to take, surely, was to try to preserve the commercial ecosystem that exists around their products, not least because a) it helps them achieve the economies of scale that make the devices cheap, and b) so many of those commercial products have educational implications. The Foundation is quite literally not responsible for the devices being prohibitively expensive, and indeed as far as I can see, when official resellers regain stock, they do so at prices very close to the pre-crisis prices, when you take into account rampant general inflation. The Zero 2W is going to be slightly more expensive. The Pi 4B seems to be at the same price. And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_; I would argue they are still achieving things on that level, because many of their activities are more general than the Pi.
  - caranti 3y ago
    > And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_ A couple of months ago I attended a talk given by Eben Upton. He talked through the history of the entire RPi initiative, starting with his observation that Computer Science admissions at Cambridge University were falling away at quite an alarming rate, and how that inspired the whole thing. Before attending the talk, I had understood the proposition to be that a cheap home computer put into the hands of kids might spark some natural curiosity, like what happened during the 80s and early 90s home microcomputer era, which would then ultimately lead to more tech-literate kids who would go on to study Computer Science and ultimately have careers in the field. I'm not sure this was wrong, but it definitely wasn't the whole story. Eben described the work of the foundation, and it's far more extensive than I had any appreciation for whatsoever. For example, both domestically and internationally the foundation are heavily involved in teacher training, and have played a role in developing curriculum across the globe to further or even initiate IT/CompSci education. The structure of the Foundation and Trading, he explained, was the most appropriate vehicle under UK tax rules for funding charitable educational work with commercial enterprise. I'm probably simplifying this massively but in essence the flow of profits/dividends/whatever up from the for-profit Trading arm to the charitable Foundation helps to pay for the significant amount of educational work that Foundation does around the world. I hadn't appreciated many of the forms of educational work that the foundation are involved in at all. From this perspective, it is perhaps easier to hold a charitable view of Eben's comments around preferential stock availability for small businesses. In the position that they have been in, whereby they're going to sell every unit produced easily whatever the channel, and keeping in mind funding the education goals of the foundation, I think it's entirely reasonable to also help keep some small businesses afloat along the way at the expense of hobbyists. Prior to this talk, I think my blind spot had been that the entire mission was to put cheap home microcomputers into the hands of kids around the world. I can understand that throttling this home or hobbyist supply in favour of commercial sales takes a bit more to interpret charitably. But the Foundation is doing so much more than that, and that was entirely lost on me, that failing to fulfill hobbyist market demand no longer looks to me like failing in the original mission.
paulcole 3y ago
Thank god! I’ve been so frustrated I couldn’t get one of these and then put it in a drawer and immediately forget about it.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  Same. I used to have an alert to notify me when pretty much any Pi was in stock. I’d purchase and stick them in a drawer. I have a drawer full of Pi’s that have never been turned on.
  - tinix 3y ago
    Got any 8gb CM4? I'll buy one from you...
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Each time this topic comes up, some broad threads emerge: - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation? - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic. Yeah, some models have been more popular than they expected. What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded? It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort. The truth is that the Raspberry Pi SBCs are unique because they are the product of their funding model. If you want "more performant" devices that are as good, you might need to front up the cash.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation? One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor. > - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic. Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world. > What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded? Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished. > It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort. Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.
Roark66 3y ago
>"...should began this July..." Seriously? Should? How. Many. Times. Have we heard it already? In the timeless words of George W Bush Junior "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... Wait, I can't be fooled again!" No way I'm going to get hopeful here and then pi locator will show one pi zero 2 W in entire Europe, in the one shop in Belgium the owner of refuses to ship out of his country... How many cool open source projects could we have by now on other boards that remained available throughout this time if the liers at the Pi foundation (and people that believed them) didn't tell us every few weeks for last X years "it's only few weeks. We're making millions, this will all resolve the next quarter the latest!" All Bull**! I've been saying it since year 2 of the shortage. Those Pis are not coming back. If your favourite project uses raspberry pi encourage them to support another board. If they(the foundation) was honest from the start and said "look guys, we've burned through all the charitable donation money and this business model is unsustainable, we have to pivot" I would have some respect for them, but not this. Having said that I also have to submit some self critique. In my own projects it has been oh so much easier to just pull one of my remaining rpi zero 2w from the drawer (it has to be zero because I'm mostly doing RC stuff) and put something together in a day vs developing software for months. Still Rockchip has gotten a lot better with their documentation. It's not a documentation a not so technical user can take and run with it, but for developers it is perfectly usable. Now if we (developers) just wanted to use those other boards seriously...
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Not coming back? But they clearly are? Pimoroni was shipping Pi 4Bs last week. It has nothing to do with "burning through the charitable donation money". The Pi is sold by a (profitable, AFAIK) wholly-owned subsidiary, the Raspberry Pi Trading Company. Manufacturing them does not absorb Foundation money at all. They have been supply-constrained on components. It's that simple, surely. Eben Upton has said it again and again, and sometimes gone into detail about which components. They chose to try to keep the whole ecosystem alive, which meant prioritising commercial customers, they've been manufacturing millions of devices per year, and it still isn't enough to meet demand. FWIW, if I was in their shoes I would have discontinued the 4B series entirely, by early 2022. I personally think they should not be operating in that segment with an SBC. I think there should just be a Pi 400 that takes a CM4. Both to simplify things in the educational sector, and to get out of the "high end SBC I am not using that is in my desk drawer" segment entirely. They should focus on the Pico, which is clearly now their most interesting product line and their most interesting educational device.
BasedAnon 3y ago
[flagged]
shashashasha___ 3y ago
I'll believe it when I see it
kfarr 3y ago
For those that love the pi and electronics I’d suggest checking out the raspberry pi pico which is not a full os but a microcontroller with tons of features including WiFi that runs Python or c scripts. Replaced the pi for me in the projects I was working on, especially paired with a nice LED matrix display. My favorite combo at the moment is this led matrix with presoldered pico w: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cosmic-unicorn https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cosmic-unicorn
michrassena 3y ago
I have a small stack of Raspberry Pi boards that I bought one at a time over the last few years. My issue with them is I could never buy three or four at once. I was always hit with the full shipping cost on something that weighs an ounce. As far as I know this has always been the case in the US. I want to be able to buy a few at a time, like any other product.
butz 3y ago
I wonder how many people have several older models of Raspberry Pi sitting in their drawers and collecting dust, as selling them seems to be too much of the hassle?
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  I have a few of the model B version that was released in 2012, somewhere in my basement. I’m not even sure how usable these would be today.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    The original one with 256MB of RAM? The later models upped that to 512MB. I ended up breaking the full-sized SD card slot on mine.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    I'm using several original BCM2835 Raspberry Pis and Pi Zeros (original) to compile pkgsrc packages for NetBSD on earmv4 and earmv5 because the newer ARM CPUs won't run anything below earmv6. There are some instructions the newer CPUs don't support that'd need to be emulated. With a USB attached SSD, they're quite reliable and run for many months at a time, compiling non-stop with no issues.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Yeah anything older than the Pi 3 with armv7 is also more or less unusable in terms of OS deps, since there just aren't many package releases being maintained for v6 and below.
      - johnklos 3y ago
        I'm using them precisely to make packages available for them, so I don't think it's fair at all to say they're unusable. The OS is fully, 100% supported, so we're not even talking about that. See: http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/arm/ http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/arm/ The number of packages available is decent and is only improving: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/
chimpoftheages 3y ago
I'd be happier if they ditched pi 4 production and just released a 5 with whatever SOC manufacturer has the best availability, hopefully that isn't Broadcom.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  There are other SBCs with SoCs from other manufacturers out there. They've been out there for a decade. Think BeagleBoard or Wandboard.
  - chimpoftheages 3y ago
    Sure, I own a few pine64 devices and an RPI4 too. I would like the raspberry PI community to synchronize on a manufacturer like rockchip for a while. I simply never see a useful broadcom chip in the wild that isn't in a RPI and the RPIs omit features I want.
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      Broadcom doesn't put chips "in the wild", which leads you to the paradox that is RPI. It was a scrap chip that Upton made into a cheap educational computer, the rest of you ran off with it as a supercheap COTS computing module and now nobody can figure out how to ship their products without it. Or, most distinctly, nobody wants to believe that the RPI isn't subsidized and all SoCs are this cheap. Broadcom doesn't deal with small fish, much less hobbyists. I've dealt with their products working for a large product maker and it wasn't any better on that side of the fence.
      - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
        Are you saying that you think Broadcom are still subsidising the Pi? Even the Zero 2W, which has a custom chip designed by Raspberry Pi? I mean, as I understand it, they ship about half a million CM4 units alone every four to six weeks, and they sell Pi hardware to businesses like Citrix: why would Broadcom need to/be willing to subsidise chips at that scale?
nubinetwork 3y ago
I haven't had many problems buying one if I need one, but Buy a PI's Canadian store is selling them for $185, which is a little much. At least they throw in a case, some heatsinks, a power supply and some cables. For those who have been having problems getting one, is it because they've been hoarding them? I'd really like to know what people are doing that needs more than two or three Pis.
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  I haven't been able to buy one in New Zealand for years now, at any price.
  - nubinetwork 3y ago
    To be fair, isn't that pretty normal for electronics in AU/NZ? I've been watching Hardware Unboxed for years and they're always lamenting how hard it is to get parts to review.
    - WheatMillington 3y ago
      No, that's not accurate.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > Buy a PI's Canadian store is selling them for $185 > For those who have been having problems getting one, is it because they've been hoarding them? They retail for well under $100. You’ve been buying from scalpers who are jacking up the prices. MSRP-priced retailers haven’t been able to keep stock in years, and often sell out within minutes of getting inventory. Some people just want their first or second RPI, but aren’t willing to pay scalpers. I don’t know how many people are hoarding them, but I know some people prefer them to arduinos and more simple microcontrollers. Many people are more familiar with Linux development instead of embedded development. When they were cheap $35 boards, the advice was buy one per project.
  - 3y ago
johnklos 3y ago
Sorry, but the company's decision to hire a former cop (nothing wrong with that), then glorify his surveillance work (not great, but not the worst thing in the world), then pretend that the people upset with that were actually vegans who were upset with a picture of bacon or some bull like that convinced me that the company is completely, utterly out of touch with normal people and with the zeitgeist of the hobbyist movement. They can go act like they're above reproach with their new "business" community all they want. Good riddance. I'll use what Raspberry Pis I already have, but I'm happy to buy Orange Pis and Nano Pis for other uses.
ralphc 3y ago
Ars Technica had an article about this a few months back, used thin-client PCs can fill in some use cases https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/used-thin-client-pcs-are-an-unsexy-readily-available-raspberry-pi-alternative/?comments=1&comments-page=1 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/used-thin-client-pcs...

141 points by edward 3y ago

epolanski 3y ago

Any rumours of a 5?

beebeepka 3y ago
No need. The CEO said (in an interview with the "explaining computers" YouTube channel) 2023 will be about fixing supply of existing models. It's reasonable to expect the 5 to arrive in 2024 at the earliest. Personally, I wouldn't expect super fast m2 ports and whatnot. Frankly, at this point I am ready to spend a bit more and get a proper 5800u mini pc or something. Waiting for AMD's Zen 4 APUs to hit the market. They are not going to be cheap, though
- sapiogram 3y ago
  > It's reasonable to expect the 5 to arrive in 2024 at the earliest My expectation is 2025 at the earliest, tbh. Mostly based on the CEO's repeated statements, and the complete lack of rumors about any developments. If a new lineup of PIs were going to launch next year, they'd have to be pretty late in development already.
- RF_Savage 3y ago
  I wouldn't hold my breath for small AMD based boards. For example PC Engines (they make the APU and ALIX boards) has stated that AMD is increasingly difficult to work with as a small manufacturer. And all their old SoC's have been EOLed.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I really wish they would decide not to do it at all. Put all the high-performance work into the CM units of different specifications. Make (or encourage the market to continue to make) mainboards that take those units. Maybe certify a couple of them for the Foundation's use. And then focus on making microcontroller-level chips at different performance levels, up to an "alternative home computer" device. Something small, which can be learned completely. Enough power for something equivalent to a Minix or a CP/M or RISC OS. The RP2040 is almost there anyway.
  - cdcarter 3y ago
    I have always been slightly annoyed that the RP2040 didn't feature a RISC-V core to being with, with a 2nd gen that includes the privilege mode specification. RP2040 as it stands is nearly capable of being "learned completely" and providing something like an OS, but having a hardware MMU really makes a different experience. Of course, the ARM architecture has an MMU spec too, but I've got a soft spot for RISC-V.
orra 3y ago
Alas, no. “Don't expect a Pi 5 five next year,” Upton said [in December 2022], explaining that the Pi team sees 2023 as a year to spend “recovering from what just happened to all of us [COVID, supply chain issues].” https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
  The raspberry pi becomes even more outdated....
  - Narishma 3y ago
    That was never a problem for them.
- kytazo 3y ago
  I'm wondering why other manufacturers don't look like impacted as much from the covid supply chain disruptions as they pose to be in every given chance.
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    I think it has to do with the fact that the majority of their product line is based on a few very specific SoCs that are quite hard to replace so fast.

marcomourao 3y ago

Excellent news. I just bought a Fujitsu thin client for €18.00 to scratch the Raspberry itch but will definitely try to get my hands on a Pi 4.

theWreckluse 3y ago
Can you run Linux on a thin client? Also where did you buy them for so cheap?
- rvense 3y ago
  As far as I understand, most thin clients nowadays are just PCs, usually AMD embedded SoCs with very good support for Linux.
- marcomourao 3y ago
  > Can you run Linux on a thin client? Yeah, these originally came preloaded with eLux. https://www.unicon.com/elux https://www.unicon.com/elux > Also where did you buy them for so cheap? Second hand on Ebay, I'm located in Europe.
- awesometech 3y ago
  This person has had success with the idea: https://weisser-zwerg.dev/posts/dell-wyse-fujitsu-futro/ https://weisser-zwerg.dev/posts/dell-wyse-fujitsu-futro/
- zh3 3y ago
  No problem running lightweight distros on them, though the really thin clients tend to be underpowered for web browsing. Available very cheaply on ebay, and pretty much all support remote boot so easy to run diskless (assuming some minimal local server).
nmstoker 3y ago
After the only ones being low spec for ages, there do seem to be some higher spec ones becoming available - I nabbed a Pi4 8Gb yesterday. No sign of Zero 2Ws yet though

kytazo 3y ago

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

kkielhofner 3y ago
I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you. On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that. I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything". With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.

euniceee3 3y ago

The shortage ruined the brand for me. Any sort of commercial product based on this cheap platform had supply issues, which caused a pivot. I had an old boss balk at me for suggesting we use Pi's back in 2013, I now see why. Glad to see the gouging finally come to an end!

tjoff 3y ago
How is that the brands fault? For better or worse they even prioritized commercial products despite it not being their core audience.
- wittenbunk 3y ago
  How is the impact of the brands choices the fault of the brand? Did you forget an /s?
  - tjoff 3y ago
    Their choice can most certainly be questioned, but in this case the choice favored the use-case OP was talking about. So if anything it should have strengthened the brand image from that point of view.
  - euniceee3 3y ago
    It was mentioned as a footnote in the Dec 2022 update. Seems like a miss by the marketing team. My bad for missing this and only seeing the headlines.
- euniceee3 3y ago
  This is the first I am hearing about the commercial support on this. I had no idea my EIN was so powerful. The brand in my mind is 100% hobby because if I was able to source enough for prototyping (which was not possible over the last 18 months without getting gouged) then sticking with tried and true platforms was the only path forward. Not trying to be cheeky, just surprised the prioritization for commercial products was not publicized more.

igou 3y ago

ARM SBC entry costs have jumped upwards of $100 and low powered Intel machines (used thin clients, nucs, workstations) have become more accessible than ever. When the 4 was brand new, 4 cores/4gb was pretty killer for the entry price. The Pi had an incredible impact but it's pretty obvious it doesn't fit very well into a lot of usecases any more given other options. I hope that over the next few years the Pi foundation can focus on its original goal for the Pi: a cheap and accessible device that could be used in schools to teach programming

kytazo 3y ago
Yes but when you compare the TDP and compute/watt of such a system compared to an arm sbc it pales in comparison. Being fan-less hence much more compact is another thing they lack as well.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  NUC and other platforms get down to single-digit watts idle. I have a much larger, very performant Ryzen 7 system that idles at 30 watts with an Nvidia GTX 1070. The GTX 1070 alone is 10w idle and tiny (under 1 sec) 70 watt peaks for inference in my various uses (the fan doesn't even start). The x86_64 architecture has come a long way in terms of energy usage and even the much older NUCs, thin clients, etc can pretty easily get to the 10 watt range. I'm not one for wasting energy but 30 watts at 24/7 usage at some of the highest energy costs in the world ($0.23/kWh) comes to roughly $5/mo and enables many, many, many things that just aren't fundamentally possible (or very ill-advised) with a Raspberry Pi. For me personally I'm more in the $0.12/kWh range and I can run this system, with a crazy amount of functionality, for around $3/mo. Yes a Raspberry Pi would be something like $0.26/mo but a few dollars a month is completely unnoticeable in a typical household utility bill. The level of your toaster or how long you microwave leftovers adds up to be significantly greater.
  - derefr 3y ago
    That's all fine if you're powering the thing off mains power. A lot of Pi use-cases involve running them on batteries, e.g. any of the Pi-powered "retro handheld" devices.

gedy 3y ago

I keep reading how "it'll get better soon" but still can't buy them like I used to. Looking forward to "here is the link you can buy today for low price". Feels a little marketing PR otherwise.

mindcrime 3y ago
I keep reading how "it'll get better soon" but still can't buy them like I used to. Their messaging has been consistent going back to at least sometime last year, from what I can tell: things will be tight at least through the end of Q2 2023 (albeit improving towards the end of that range) and will get much better through Q3 and Q4, with normal (pre-pandemic) availability by sometime in Q4. So far things seem to be tracking exactly along that path. Prices on the scalper-resold Pi 4's on Amazon started dropping precipitously about a month or so ago, and have dropped from north of $200 USD to around $120 USD (for the 8GB model). And rpilocator consistently shows far more availability of different models than it did a couple of months ago. Clearly we aren't "out of the woods" yet, but one can absolutely start to see the lights of civilization in the distance if you look. https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workstation/dp/B0899VXM8F/ https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Computer-Suitable-Workst...

awesometech 3y ago

I couldn't get them for use as ambiance devices so I bought some cheap Lenovo Ideapads, they work great.

rcarmo 3y ago
There are also the ThinkSmart View devices: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330
- awesometech 3y ago
  Those look cool, I wasn't aware of them. I feel more comfortable with the laptops since they usually undergo a grueling test cycle at Lenovo. I hook them up to an external monitor which hides their presence and use a wireless air mouse to control them.

botanical 3y ago

I feel like the Raspberry Pi foundation hasn't met its objective of computers being accessible to everyone (eg. children). The Pi itself is prohibitively expensive, and it looks like they cater to companies first. Arduino and it open sourcing the hardware meant very cheap but less powerful SBCs. I hope to see something in a similar vein from them.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Until there was a chip shortage, they really did meet that obligation. The decision that nobody likes that they had to take, surely, was to try to preserve the commercial ecosystem that exists around their products, not least because a) it helps them achieve the economies of scale that make the devices cheap, and b) so many of those commercial products have educational implications. The Foundation is quite literally not responsible for the devices being prohibitively expensive, and indeed as far as I can see, when official resellers regain stock, they do so at prices very close to the pre-crisis prices, when you take into account rampant general inflation. The Zero 2W is going to be slightly more expensive. The Pi 4B seems to be at the same price. And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_; I would argue they are still achieving things on that level, because many of their activities are more general than the Pi.
- caranti 3y ago
  > And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_ A couple of months ago I attended a talk given by Eben Upton. He talked through the history of the entire RPi initiative, starting with his observation that Computer Science admissions at Cambridge University were falling away at quite an alarming rate, and how that inspired the whole thing. Before attending the talk, I had understood the proposition to be that a cheap home computer put into the hands of kids might spark some natural curiosity, like what happened during the 80s and early 90s home microcomputer era, which would then ultimately lead to more tech-literate kids who would go on to study Computer Science and ultimately have careers in the field. I'm not sure this was wrong, but it definitely wasn't the whole story. Eben described the work of the foundation, and it's far more extensive than I had any appreciation for whatsoever. For example, both domestically and internationally the foundation are heavily involved in teacher training, and have played a role in developing curriculum across the globe to further or even initiate IT/CompSci education. The structure of the Foundation and Trading, he explained, was the most appropriate vehicle under UK tax rules for funding charitable educational work with commercial enterprise. I'm probably simplifying this massively but in essence the flow of profits/dividends/whatever up from the for-profit Trading arm to the charitable Foundation helps to pay for the significant amount of educational work that Foundation does around the world. I hadn't appreciated many of the forms of educational work that the foundation are involved in at all. From this perspective, it is perhaps easier to hold a charitable view of Eben's comments around preferential stock availability for small businesses. In the position that they have been in, whereby they're going to sell every unit produced easily whatever the channel, and keeping in mind funding the education goals of the foundation, I think it's entirely reasonable to also help keep some small businesses afloat along the way at the expense of hobbyists. Prior to this talk, I think my blind spot had been that the entire mission was to put cheap home microcomputers into the hands of kids around the world. I can understand that throttling this home or hobbyist supply in favour of commercial sales takes a bit more to interpret charitably. But the Foundation is doing so much more than that, and that was entirely lost on me, that failing to fulfill hobbyist market demand no longer looks to me like failing in the original mission.

paulcole 3y ago

Thank god! I’ve been so frustrated I couldn’t get one of these and then put it in a drawer and immediately forget about it.

lotsoweiners 3y ago
Same. I used to have an alert to notify me when pretty much any Pi was in stock. I’d purchase and stick them in a drawer. I have a drawer full of Pi’s that have never been turned on.
- tinix 3y ago
  Got any 8gb CM4? I'll buy one from you...

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

Each time this topic comes up, some broad threads emerge: - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation? - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic. Yeah, some models have been more popular than they expected. What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded? It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort. The truth is that the Raspberry Pi SBCs are unique because they are the product of their funding model. If you want "more performant" devices that are as good, you might need to front up the cash.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation? One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor. > - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic. Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world. > What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded? Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished. > It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort. Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.

Roark66 3y ago

>"...should began this July..." Seriously? Should? How. Many. Times. Have we heard it already? In the timeless words of George W Bush Junior "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... Wait, I can't be fooled again!" No way I'm going to get hopeful here and then pi locator will show one pi zero 2 W in entire Europe, in the one shop in Belgium the owner of refuses to ship out of his country... How many cool open source projects could we have by now on other boards that remained available throughout this time if the liers at the Pi foundation (and people that believed them) didn't tell us every few weeks for last X years "it's only few weeks. We're making millions, this will all resolve the next quarter the latest!" All Bull**! I've been saying it since year 2 of the shortage. Those Pis are not coming back. If your favourite project uses raspberry pi encourage them to support another board. If they(the foundation) was honest from the start and said "look guys, we've burned through all the charitable donation money and this business model is unsustainable, we have to pivot" I would have some respect for them, but not this. Having said that I also have to submit some self critique. In my own projects it has been oh so much easier to just pull one of my remaining rpi zero 2w from the drawer (it has to be zero because I'm mostly doing RC stuff) and put something together in a day vs developing software for months. Still Rockchip has gotten a lot better with their documentation. It's not a documentation a not so technical user can take and run with it, but for developers it is perfectly usable. Now if we (developers) just wanted to use those other boards seriously...

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Not coming back? But they clearly are? Pimoroni was shipping Pi 4Bs last week. It has nothing to do with "burning through the charitable donation money". The Pi is sold by a (profitable, AFAIK) wholly-owned subsidiary, the Raspberry Pi Trading Company. Manufacturing them does not absorb Foundation money at all. They have been supply-constrained on components. It's that simple, surely. Eben Upton has said it again and again, and sometimes gone into detail about which components. They chose to try to keep the whole ecosystem alive, which meant prioritising commercial customers, they've been manufacturing millions of devices per year, and it still isn't enough to meet demand. FWIW, if I was in their shoes I would have discontinued the 4B series entirely, by early 2022. I personally think they should not be operating in that segment with an SBC. I think there should just be a Pi 400 that takes a CM4. Both to simplify things in the educational sector, and to get out of the "high end SBC I am not using that is in my desk drawer" segment entirely. They should focus on the Pico, which is clearly now their most interesting product line and their most interesting educational device.

BasedAnon 3y ago

[flagged]

shashashasha___ 3y ago

I'll believe it when I see it

kfarr 3y ago

For those that love the pi and electronics I’d suggest checking out the raspberry pi pico which is not a full os but a microcontroller with tons of features including WiFi that runs Python or c scripts. Replaced the pi for me in the projects I was working on, especially paired with a nice LED matrix display. My favorite combo at the moment is this led matrix with presoldered pico w: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cosmic-unicorn https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cosmic-unicorn

michrassena 3y ago

I have a small stack of Raspberry Pi boards that I bought one at a time over the last few years. My issue with them is I could never buy three or four at once. I was always hit with the full shipping cost on something that weighs an ounce. As far as I know this has always been the case in the US. I want to be able to buy a few at a time, like any other product.

butz 3y ago

I wonder how many people have several older models of Raspberry Pi sitting in their drawers and collecting dust, as selling them seems to be too much of the hassle?

LeafItAlone 3y ago
I have a few of the model B version that was released in 2012, somewhere in my basement. I’m not even sure how usable these would be today.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  The original one with 256MB of RAM? The later models upped that to 512MB. I ended up breaking the full-sized SD card slot on mine.
- johnklos 3y ago
  I'm using several original BCM2835 Raspberry Pis and Pi Zeros (original) to compile pkgsrc packages for NetBSD on earmv4 and earmv5 because the newer ARM CPUs won't run anything below earmv6. There are some instructions the newer CPUs don't support that'd need to be emulated. With a USB attached SSD, they're quite reliable and run for many months at a time, compiling non-stop with no issues.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Yeah anything older than the Pi 3 with armv7 is also more or less unusable in terms of OS deps, since there just aren't many package releases being maintained for v6 and below.
    - johnklos 3y ago
      I'm using them precisely to make packages available for them, so I don't think it's fair at all to say they're unusable. The OS is fully, 100% supported, so we're not even talking about that. See: http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/arm/ http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/arm/ The number of packages available is decent and is only improving: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/

chimpoftheages 3y ago

I'd be happier if they ditched pi 4 production and just released a 5 with whatever SOC manufacturer has the best availability, hopefully that isn't Broadcom.

joezydeco 3y ago
There are other SBCs with SoCs from other manufacturers out there. They've been out there for a decade. Think BeagleBoard or Wandboard.
- chimpoftheages 3y ago
  Sure, I own a few pine64 devices and an RPI4 too. I would like the raspberry PI community to synchronize on a manufacturer like rockchip for a while. I simply never see a useful broadcom chip in the wild that isn't in a RPI and the RPIs omit features I want.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    Broadcom doesn't put chips "in the wild", which leads you to the paradox that is RPI. It was a scrap chip that Upton made into a cheap educational computer, the rest of you ran off with it as a supercheap COTS computing module and now nobody can figure out how to ship their products without it. Or, most distinctly, nobody wants to believe that the RPI isn't subsidized and all SoCs are this cheap. Broadcom doesn't deal with small fish, much less hobbyists. I've dealt with their products working for a large product maker and it wasn't any better on that side of the fence.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      Are you saying that you think Broadcom are still subsidising the Pi? Even the Zero 2W, which has a custom chip designed by Raspberry Pi? I mean, as I understand it, they ship about half a million CM4 units alone every four to six weeks, and they sell Pi hardware to businesses like Citrix: why would Broadcom need to/be willing to subsidise chips at that scale?

nubinetwork 3y ago

I haven't had many problems buying one if I need one, but Buy a PI's Canadian store is selling them for $185, which is a little much. At least they throw in a case, some heatsinks, a power supply and some cables. For those who have been having problems getting one, is it because they've been hoarding them? I'd really like to know what people are doing that needs more than two or three Pis.

WheatMillington 3y ago
I haven't been able to buy one in New Zealand for years now, at any price.
- nubinetwork 3y ago
  To be fair, isn't that pretty normal for electronics in AU/NZ? I've been watching Hardware Unboxed for years and they're always lamenting how hard it is to get parts to review.
  - WheatMillington 3y ago
    No, that's not accurate.
vineyardmike 3y ago
> Buy a PI's Canadian store is selling them for $185 > For those who have been having problems getting one, is it because they've been hoarding them? They retail for well under $100. You’ve been buying from scalpers who are jacking up the prices. MSRP-priced retailers haven’t been able to keep stock in years, and often sell out within minutes of getting inventory. Some people just want their first or second RPI, but aren’t willing to pay scalpers. I don’t know how many people are hoarding them, but I know some people prefer them to arduinos and more simple microcontrollers. Many people are more familiar with Linux development instead of embedded development. When they were cheap $35 boards, the advice was buy one per project.
- 3y ago

johnklos 3y ago

Sorry, but the company's decision to hire a former cop (nothing wrong with that), then glorify his surveillance work (not great, but not the worst thing in the world), then pretend that the people upset with that were actually vegans who were upset with a picture of bacon or some bull like that convinced me that the company is completely, utterly out of touch with normal people and with the zeitgeist of the hobbyist movement. They can go act like they're above reproach with their new "business" community all they want. Good riddance. I'll use what Raspberry Pis I already have, but I'm happy to buy Orange Pis and Nano Pis for other uses.

ralphc 3y ago

Ars Technica had an article about this a few months back, used thin-client PCs can fill in some use cases https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/used-thin-client-pcs-are-an-unsexy-readily-available-raspberry-pi-alternative/?comments=1&comments-page=1 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/used-thin-client-pcs...