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Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket
- spwa4 10mo ago... for the worst possible imaginable reason, a massive price rise for both Raspberry Pi and mini pcs.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoAI is an impressive technology, but because its turned into a Space Race we're getting into some wild territory. Sam Altman who has been notorious for being quite the con artist is at the helm of this. I heard a friend suggest that the real AI bubble starts with Sam Altman, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unaware, Sam Altman has quite a crazy history, including selling a company with questionable MAU's for millions of dollars, which was then shut down because the actual MAU's was much lower than suggested. He also claimed to be chairman of YC with the SEC for years, despite never being chairman of YC. I wouldn't trust Sam Altman alone with my wife or kids, why should I trust him with AI? Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
- irusensei 10mo agoDo you need anything else than scanning people eyeballs for supposedly UBI cryptocurrency?
- lawn 10mo agoSam is also behind Worldcoin. He's a complete grifter.
- metalliqaz 10mo agoSam Altman is the world's second most successful liar, behind Elon Musk. Elon only dislikes him because he was on the other end for once.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoIndirectly related but it's a little surprising that we haven't heard about price adjustments from Valve for the Steam Deck yet to account for the DRAM price increases. Higher DRAM prices are bound to also affect their unreleased devices and make them a tougher sell to buyers.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI assume they're going to sell them at a bit of a loss, but I do wonder too if the RAM cost will force them out of the project for the time being.
- iszomer 10mo agoThey've already ended production for their basic 256GB LCD model; the 512GB OLED is now their new baseline.
- mossTechnician 10mo agoI don't think they'll be able to sell at a loss, because they are effectively selling desktop computers, not dedicated game consoles. It would be easy for a company to flash Windows onto them and deploy them in an office space, for example.
- wpm 10mo agoPrice parity but not feature parity. I still struggle to find good use-cases for the full sized Pi that both require direct GPIO and the increased CPU capabilities/storage speeds. For anything that needs GPIO, I find it much easier to just run it on a Zero 2W. For anything else, where I just need "small computer running Linux to do a thing over USB or the network", the Intel mini-PCs are still a better deal. 1. They are usually upgradable, either in storage, and/or RAM, WiFi, etc depending on which one you buy. 2. They usually have actual M.2 storage without the need for an add-on board. 3. More sensible board and port layouts. I despise the Pi B form factor. Easily the worst thing about my Radxa X4 is the slavish "lets make it Pi B" form factor, which they didn't even manage to do, so any time I use it it's a port squid mess instead of having everything be neatly managable and I don't get to use any of the Pi B form-factor accessories I have anyways. 4. Can run any x86 operating system, and get installed off of a USB. I dual boot my Radxa X4 between Windows and Linux. 5. Typically have faster networking and definitely better video/NPU hardware. Intel QSV is excellent. 6. Power usage stats that are a rounding error up or down from what a Pi 5 could do. At this point, I'd rather the Pi Foundation really focus on the Pico stuff, I find it far more interesting. The compute modules are also pretty useful when you really want to customize the I/O. As the landscape changed, the full-size Pi B's just seem...left out. Weird boot process, weird form factor, weird Broadcom stuff, weird price/performance ratio, downright hostile power supply choices (5V5A is supported by like two special snowflake supplies, and guess what, the Pi Foundation sells one!), few upsides. Maybe if the mini-PCs prices still increase, and the Pi Foundation can still get away with selling 8GB Pi 5s at $100 or whatever, it'll make more sense.
- connorbrinton 10mo ago100% agree on the better video hardware. I found out this weekend the Raspberry Pi 5 removes the dedicated video encoder present on the Pi 4B. I was getting 2-3 fps in OBS, which makes it unusable for my application. Any mini PC would do much better with dedicated encode capabilities. To be fair, I haven't messed around with video encoding settings yet. I've seen claims the Pi 5 can do 1080p60 with 50% of the CPU. I could trade off quality for faster encoding, but with a mini PC I could get high quality encoding at real-time speeds. I'm feeling some buyer's remorse with the Pi 5 right now...
- margalabargala 10mo agoI have a lot of trouble trusting pre-built mini computers from random manufacturers. Way too easy to slap some malware on a chip on the board somewhere. Maybe I just have trust issues but I don't really want to give anything I buy on Aliexpress network access. I wish these form factors were more popular with more reputable brands.
- reactordev 10mo agoBeelink has served me very well the last decade. I used to use those old Shuttle XPC's and things but Beelink has proved you can fit a lot of power in a puck. You can also take it apart, add memory, add m2 drive, whatever. Not an ad for Beelink, just saying they have some awesome little mini pc's that I've used for home lab clusters. Ryzen 9 16C+32T little beasts that are completely silent.
- mrmuagi 10mo agoSome of the recent Beelink ones have soldered ram though.
- reactordev 10mo agoSome of them have 128GB of unified memory…
- trvz 10mo agoThe Mac mini exists. Suffering is a choice.
- margalabargala 10mo agoI've been Linux-only for over a decade, I've long since made that choice :) Also, the cheapest Mac Mini is $600. The Mini PCs we're discussing are generally sub-$200.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoAnd used intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They're pretty handy and upgradable actually. I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2 cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs. PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new, new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a particular use.
- anthk 10mo agoLearn to live with 1GB of RAM. Either CLI/TUI tools, or software like Dillo or Sxiv. Mainline dillo from their Git and not the outdated one from the repos. The new "dilloc" it's amazing, you need Dillo compiled with socket control support. Then you will be able to use dilloc as a client to spawn commands con scripts. For instance, to rewrite URL's from a list. Hint: the ones from https://farside.link https://farside.link . Youtube to Invidious, X.com to Nitter and so on. Connect to https://farside.link https://farside.link, https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com, https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org or gopher://magical.fish as a services portal or news source. Use mpv+yt-dlp if you are under Unix to watch online videos. Complex? Just a little bit first. Incredibily rewarding later. No JS will be needed to play videos on most websites. Also with yt-dlp you are able to save them for later usage. Try programming with small languages from https://t3x.org https://t3x.org and doing Math/Intro to Statistics book with Klong and its manual. s9fes can be a good enough Scheme Lisp to complete the exircies Concrete Abstractions and maybe SICP if you know how to reimplement (frame) and the missing functions. An easy task after CACS. Consider SQLite+Python+TkInter or TCK+Tk as the DDBB UI on top. Golang can be great too with 1GB of RAM and a simple n270 netbook, I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools. Everything with nvi as the editor (basically vi+UTF-8+some status line for help), simple Makefiles git://bitreich.org/english_knight and entr(1) as a tool to watch a directory and spawn 'make' on file changes.
- areoform 10mo agoIf you have an Apple ][ retro emulator, what book would you recommend to explore programming the full stack way (as in, assembly language up to lisp)?
- anthk 10mo agoIDK much about 6502 assembly on Apple II (I barely did a Hello World under the Kim-Uno emulator), but these people can help: https://www.6502.org/tutorials/ https://www.6502.org/tutorials/
- rubatuga 10mo agoShoutout to another fellow Yggdrasil user! There are dozens of us!
- bullen 10mo agoTo write this article without mentioning the 3588, is like writing about Venezuela without mentioning oil. Pi 5 and N150 are completely meaningless since before they came into existence. Also the price of 3588 increases by batch so you can still get them at almost launch price (4GB was $70 now $110, next batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)
- areoform 10mo agoCould you please provide a link? I don't know what 3588 is. It seems to be, Rockchip RK3588?
- bullen 10mo agoYes, you have to google it yourself, there are too many with pros and cons beyond a hn comment.
- toast0 10mo agoGoogle gives me this for 3588 https://www.tractordata.com/farm-tractors/000/3/8/381-international-harvester-3588.html https://www.tractordata.com/farm-tractors/000/3/8/381-intern... I guess giving up a life of computing and starting a life of vintage tractorring is pretty compelling, but I don't think they're making new batches of 1981 tractors; but who knows what VW is up to these days. OTOH, DuckDuckGo gave me California tax forms. No thanks!
- Youden 10mo agoIf you search "pi n150 3588" (without the quotes), Kagi, Google and DuckDuckGo all make it clear that "3588" means "RK3588" or "Rockchip RK3588". Back in the old days we didn't have all these AI things and personalization to predict our intent, we had to put context in our queries :)
- areoform 10mo agoYes, but they seem to be talking about a specific product? "(4GB was $70 now $110, next batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)" I think it's reasonable to ask, what's $70, now $110 and $150? If you're quoting specific numbers for a specific product that you're claiming should be in the thread and then you refuse to link it...
- irusensei 10mo agoWell hopefully this will help to keep the "x86 guy" from barging into EVERY arm sbc related conversation regardless of the subject. They will ignore every argument about what the conversation is about and point out their recycled trash Lenovo uses 6W on idle while conflating idle power usage with efficiency per watt. "Yeah dude we know but I need a Pi for this project. So sit down."
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- oliwarner 10mo agoYou know you can get little USB GPIO boards that emulate most of the Pi's pins for you right? /s
- pjmlp 10mo agoI would still go with the Raspberry Pi, because it is designed from the ground up for Linux, while most mini PC home labs are the usual hit-and-miss with Linux distros.