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When the first Raspberry Pis came out I was in love. It was incredible, a full (headless) computer that was small and cheap. I played with it for a while but ne

When the first Raspberry Pis came out I was in love. It was incredible, a full (headless) computer that was small and cheap. I played with it for a while but never had a great long-term use case for it. I bought pretty much every Pi up to the 4, always trying to find a place it could occupy in my life but never really managed to find a good use. I ran Home Assistant on a 3 then later on 4 (with a super nice case, NVME hat+stick, etc) but HA was not super stable. I, wrongly, blamed it on the HA software for a long time then I bought a Beelink mini computer and moved HA to it and I have literally not thought about HA since, it's worked flawlessly. Maybe I had bad luck, maybe I happened to get 6 (I had multiple of certain Pis) defective boards but they always felt "unstable" to me. They might run fine for months then randomly need to be rebooted. I'm sure some of you will say "I've had a Raspberry Pi 1 running constantly since I bought it and it's rock solid", good for you, that was not my experience. During COVID (maybe before as well) it came out that the company was prioritizing bulk sales over sales to individuals (or rather sales to companies that resold to individuals) which soured me. This news just further confirms my belief that the company and product I loved is dead and probably has been for some time. It was nice while it lasted.

BillFranklin 2y ago
I think they were trying to stop resellers price gouging during the chip shortage crisis. On ebay you could buy Pis for well over what they were available for on first-party sites (just like PlayStation 5s!). As a counterpoint, they let me buy Pis as an individual, but I had to send in a picture of myself with a dated piece of paper like a Reddit AMA to prove I was legit. FWIW there are Pi alternatives without the branding, but usually for the super low price point mini-PCs you are after you need to go to China to firms like Beelink...
- jovial_cavalier 2y ago
  They could have just raised the prices for individual customers themselves instead of creating a massive opportunity to price gouge. Prioritizing bulk orders sounds like they just didn't want to be the front-end.
simcop2387 2y ago
> Maybe I had bad luck, maybe I happened to get 6 (I had multiple of certain Pis) defective boards but they always felt "unstable" to me. I've never had bad boards but I've had similar experiences like this, it's always turned out to be a power supply issue, or a counterfit sd card. Can't say I know what your experience will be but those are the places I'd look at first before the board. > During COVID (maybe before as well) it came out that the company was prioritizing bulk sales over sales to individuals (or rather sales to companies that resold to individuals) which soured me. If you go watch some of the interviews on this, it was a combination of things: 1) Supply chain issues, like everything during COVID, they couldn't keep up manufacturing capacity. 2) They weren't favoring resellers, but were favoring "industrial" or "commercial" (whatever you want to call them) customers because of pre-existing contracts that they had to fulfill or it'd kill them since they'd have to pay fines or deal with contract disputes. Since it was more guaranteed revenue it also helped them keep the lights on without just shutting down at the time too. Still didn't feel great either at the time, but I'd say that the way you put it reads as mis-charactarising what happened as being a purely profit motivate thing.
moffkalast 2y ago
Sounds like problems with the sdcard, and that really is a problem. If your OS is not read-only (which isn't a simple or practical setup) it'll eventually wear out from constant logging and die. That might be part of the instability you saw. So far the solution for long term stability is either that or to get a USB/PCIe NVMe instead. eMMC would be a good solution which is why nearly every single other SBC manufacturer supports it, but of course the Pi foundation stubbornly refuses to touch it because...? Maybe just to annoy us.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I thought so as well, that's why my latest RPi setup used this case [0] with this [2] expansion board. I still had instability. I didn't cheap out on the SD cards I bought either. I threw lots of money at a "cheap" board to try to improve reliability but just never got there. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP

BillFranklin 2y ago

I think they were trying to stop resellers price gouging during the chip shortage crisis. On ebay you could buy Pis for well over what they were available for on first-party sites (just like PlayStation 5s!). As a counterpoint, they let me buy Pis as an individual, but I had to send in a picture of myself with a dated piece of paper like a Reddit AMA to prove I was legit. FWIW there are Pi alternatives without the branding, but usually for the super low price point mini-PCs you are after you need to go to China to firms like Beelink...

jovial_cavalier 2y ago
They could have just raised the prices for individual customers themselves instead of creating a massive opportunity to price gouge. Prioritizing bulk orders sounds like they just didn't want to be the front-end.

simcop2387 2y ago

> Maybe I had bad luck, maybe I happened to get 6 (I had multiple of certain Pis) defective boards but they always felt "unstable" to me. I've never had bad boards but I've had similar experiences like this, it's always turned out to be a power supply issue, or a counterfit sd card. Can't say I know what your experience will be but those are the places I'd look at first before the board. > During COVID (maybe before as well) it came out that the company was prioritizing bulk sales over sales to individuals (or rather sales to companies that resold to individuals) which soured me. If you go watch some of the interviews on this, it was a combination of things: 1) Supply chain issues, like everything during COVID, they couldn't keep up manufacturing capacity. 2) They weren't favoring resellers, but were favoring "industrial" or "commercial" (whatever you want to call them) customers because of pre-existing contracts that they had to fulfill or it'd kill them since they'd have to pay fines or deal with contract disputes. Since it was more guaranteed revenue it also helped them keep the lights on without just shutting down at the time too. Still didn't feel great either at the time, but I'd say that the way you put it reads as mis-charactarising what happened as being a purely profit motivate thing.

moffkalast 2y ago

Sounds like problems with the sdcard, and that really is a problem. If your OS is not read-only (which isn't a simple or practical setup) it'll eventually wear out from constant logging and die. That might be part of the instability you saw. So far the solution for long term stability is either that or to get a USB/PCIe NVMe instead. eMMC would be a good solution which is why nearly every single other SBC manufacturer supports it, but of course the Pi foundation stubbornly refuses to touch it because...? Maybe just to annoy us.

joshstrange 2y ago
I thought so as well, that's why my latest RPi setup used this case [0] with this [2] expansion board. I still had instability. I didn't cheap out on the SD cards I bought either. I threw lots of money at a "cheap" board to try to improve reliability but just never got there. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP