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Arm is by no means legacy. Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers. That specifically means using cheap hardware. Typically cheapness is th

Arm is by no means legacy. Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers. That specifically means using cheap hardware. Typically cheapness is this volume level comes from reusing components that have had their r&d paid off by high volume or previous successful products. This is pretty much my you don’t see SBCs with current gen smartphone performance. RISC-V may get there eventually, but devices like the raspberry pi won’t be the first place to look

bigiain 3y ago
"Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers." They lived up to that goal 10 years ago. But there are "stated goals" and "actions", and actions speak the truth when they're in conflict with stated goals. The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers. The Pi Foundation hasn't demonstrated any success getting affordable computers into the hands of anyone except high volume commercial buyers in the last few years. They're riding on their "hobbyist" reputation and taking advantage of everything hobbyists (and educators and open sourer developers) have done for their product, while turning their backs on all those people. Why would any open source dev bother fixing their Wi-Fi drivers for them, when they won't even sell you their board to test on reliably?
- 542458 3y ago
  > The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers While Pis were a hot commodity about a year ago, today as far as I can tell consumer Pi supply is mostly back to normal. My local vendor has stock of 0s and 0Ws, 02Ws, every memory config of 4B other than the 1GB, 3As, picos in all configs, and some flavors of CM4. Yes, 5s are somewhat hard to get, but I don’t think it’s big institutional customers soaking those up - there isn’t a CM form factor for them yet, and besides, nobody would have had time to build a full product around them yet.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  It seems so weird to me when people express this opinion. There was a once in a century global pandemic that so severely crushed supply chains that even car manufacturers couldn't produce cars. What do we expect Raspberry Pi to do when this happens? They apparently have both business customers and hobby customers. They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. I have no idea what the financial internals at Raspberry Pi are, but I also know that they did not cause nor want the chip shortage to happen, and it is kind of out of their hands whether such a thing happens again. So without knowing what they really should have done, why fault them for this decision?
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. The correct decision would in my opinion have been: prioritize the business customers as the Raspberry Pi Foundation did (exactly because of such a reason), but let them pay grossly inflated prizes for this privilege, which hardly any private customer would be willing to pay. If such a course of action had been done, hardly any hobbyist would have complained, in particular or for example if such "exploitative" prizes for business customers would have been used to subsidize Raspberry Pis for schools during the pandemic (which was the original mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  I guess personally I'd rather have a company prioritize businesses over hobbyists especially given that the businesses that typically use products like raspberry pi are smaller businesses that really struggled with chip shortages during that time. It was certainly a frustrating time for everyone involved, but when there is scarcity, someone has to go without, and I guess I just don't mind that they prioritized people trying to build a product. It suggests to me that the company may be able to weather storms and still be around in a few years time.

bigiain 3y ago

"Raspberry PIs stated goal is to produce affordable computers." They lived up to that goal 10 years ago. But there are "stated goals" and "actions", and actions speak the truth when they're in conflict with stated goals. The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers. The Pi Foundation hasn't demonstrated any success getting affordable computers into the hands of anyone except high volume commercial buyers in the last few years. They're riding on their "hobbyist" reputation and taking advantage of everything hobbyists (and educators and open sourer developers) have done for their product, while turning their backs on all those people. Why would any open source dev bother fixing their Wi-Fi drivers for them, when they won't even sell you their board to test on reliably?

542458 3y ago
> The recent (lack of) availability to anyone except commercial/industrial buyers While Pis were a hot commodity about a year ago, today as far as I can tell consumer Pi supply is mostly back to normal. My local vendor has stock of 0s and 0Ws, 02Ws, every memory config of 4B other than the 1GB, 3As, picos in all configs, and some flavors of CM4. Yes, 5s are somewhat hard to get, but I don’t think it’s big institutional customers soaking those up - there isn’t a CM form factor for them yet, and besides, nobody would have had time to build a full product around them yet.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
It seems so weird to me when people express this opinion. There was a once in a century global pandemic that so severely crushed supply chains that even car manufacturers couldn't produce cars. What do we expect Raspberry Pi to do when this happens? They apparently have both business customers and hobby customers. They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. I have no idea what the financial internals at Raspberry Pi are, but I also know that they did not cause nor want the chip shortage to happen, and it is kind of out of their hands whether such a thing happens again. So without knowing what they really should have done, why fault them for this decision?
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. The correct decision would in my opinion have been: prioritize the business customers as the Raspberry Pi Foundation did (exactly because of such a reason), but let them pay grossly inflated prizes for this privilege, which hardly any private customer would be willing to pay. If such a course of action had been done, hardly any hobbyist would have complained, in particular or for example if such "exploitative" prizes for business customers would have been used to subsidize Raspberry Pis for schools during the pandemic (which was the original mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
MobiusHorizons 3y ago
I guess personally I'd rather have a company prioritize businesses over hobbyists especially given that the businesses that typically use products like raspberry pi are smaller businesses that really struggled with chip shortages during that time. It was certainly a frustrating time for everyone involved, but when there is scarcity, someone has to go without, and I guess I just don't mind that they prioritized people trying to build a product. It suggests to me that the company may be able to weather storms and still be around in a few years time.