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Raspberry Pi’s were amazing when they were like $30… cheap enough to be accessible to most people and you could do a lot with them. I still have an older Pi that runs pihole.
Now that it’s $300, there are a lot of other options out there. I find it hard to recommend a Pi anymore.
That isn’t really fair. After all raw sewage can be used to create fertilizer and the output of the slop machines can’t.
wtf is even happening
End stage capitalism.
It’ll get lots worse before it gets better.
We are in the early stages of post capitalism. Capitalism has finished, the major players have won and there won’t be any new major players emerging. Post capitalism is where economic systems no longer operate under traditional capitalist principles. It’s about the shift away from labour being the foundation of wealth.
Read up on it, the world is quite clearly transitioning
The old world is dying.
The new world struggles to be born.
Now is the time of enshittification.
“and what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Mara Lago to shoot itself out of a leathery, Botox injected cunt to be born.”
- Yeates, probably
Sounds like Varoufakis’s book. I didn’t like it.
This is just monopoly capitalism, which is a stage of capitalism. This is just the late-stage, just before we hit the end-stage when overproduction and the falling rate of profit lead to world war to remove the surplus and induce new demand for reconstruction.
And we’re barreling right into WW3 as we speak.
It’s far from dying while people still believe in it’s myths
I miss when technology would get cheaper and better.
I hope one of the effects will be that people stop building 5gb websites and apps on some weird js framework to show a tweet or sth. Efficiency is one of the things we can improve
We went from cheap hobby computer to luxury item with emotional damage real quick 💀
Pis have been overpriced for a long time now. They’re often just expensive or more expensive than a mini pc. And the mini pc’s are nearly as power efficient while being much more capable.
There’s also the clones. If the community as a whole would stop being so brand-loyal and started reaching out into the world of these tiny computers that’s often better, but at half the price, the Raspberry Pie would die an ugly death.
I still use raspberry pies. One for Klipper, one as a NAS and a few older models for testing. I’m satisfied with the Pi 4 2GB models. What alternatives are there that are at least as good?
I’m considering looking for old laptops with broken screens.
Suggested ebay search:
off lease thin client lot.
I’m not in the scene, but my SO has lots of them and only two of them are Raspberry. He has/had Orange Pie, Banana Pie, Nano Pie and many others.
Might as well get an used ThinkPad or something at that point (idk, I’m not big into that stuff yet)
They are at war against ownership (not raspberry pi org, but the general oligarchy). It’s the next step coming after “every software is a cloud service subscription”. We are heading towards the “you can’t own a computer, just rent one from the cloud”. In this day and age, computers are necessary, for everything, for education, public services, employment, entertainment. Once we have to pay taxes to the Lords in order to have access to our mean of substance, we are essentially in a new era of feudalism.
One could call it “technofeudalism”.
That’s exactly where this is headed. Modern day slavery. They take away the usability of offline devices so we only use their devices to use their apps and work for their companies, and anyone trying to circumvent this (VPNs, refusing Age Verification, Piracy, FOSS) gets visited by the technofeudalists’ friends at ICEstapo.
yeah it’s the “war on computation” that’s the other term Cory Doctorow coined apart from “enshitification”
The end goal is to destroy all consumer available general purpose computing.
I’m not too worried about this. It sucks for the time being, and who knows how long they economy will suffer when the US fully collapses. The silver lining is that the actual cost of producing the hardware doesn’t match the inflated evaluation of it. The drivers of this won’t be able to sustain the hoarding. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad. Anyone with a time machine would probably chose to give Peter and Sam a visit.
I don’t know, people said the same about videocard prices during the crypto boom, the 2020 shortage and every time prices just went up. I doubt prices will go down
Prices going up has to match the demand for the supply. Price goes too high, then there is enough incentive for competitors to come into the market and increase supply. In the long run, it hurts the hoarders.
So when will GPUs get cheaper again?
IT people have been saying that everything would be run in the cloud for the last 25 years. The truth is that processing is not profitable. They will not offload all processing into the cloud nor do they want to. The struggle is against right to repair/modify and ownership/control of software.
They can make “processing” profitable when their service is the only available option and they can charge whatever price they want for lackluster quality of service.
You said we’re heading to “you can’t own a computer, just rent one from the cloud”.
What I’m saying is that since at least the 1990s / early 2000s we have had dumb terminals that connect to the server that does all the processing and provides the video signal. People were saying this was what everyone would be using in the future. The fact that you are still saying this makes me really skeptical. When will this be?
The Data-Terminals and mainframe architecture of the time was a technical solution emerging from limitations of the time, bulky and pricey electronics. Also, computers at the time were used for special tasks.
Today, we can fit an ultra powerful computer in your pocket, no problem. You practically can’t survive without a smartphone (or computer), or yes you can survive, but you can’t be part of society without one.
Today’s trend to takeaway the computing power off the hands of normal citizens, when it’s so cheap and practical to have it, is not driving by technical limitations (or improvement of technology). It’s driven my the goal to extract every bit of money, ownership and finally freedom that we have have citizens.
Why would they give you the option to buy a top of the line 2000€ laptop and let you use it with Linux for everything you need until the heat-death of the universe when they can can extort you of 200€/month instead? Much more profitable. They can change the price whenever they want and you will have no choice but pay, because you can’t even find a single DDR3 RAM stick to buy anywhere! Why would they just let you use the heated sits in your car when they can extort you of a 60€/month subscription for it, on top of the 70k€ buying price ?
It’s not a technical trend, it’s an ideological one.
You really think “they” are going to make computers and Linux illegal so they can force you to pay $200 a month for their own platform? Hilarious that people agree with you
They don’t have to make alternative OS illegal, they can simply make it unusable.
It’s not necessarily done my pure evil intent, it just happens as a side effect of other decisions.
One example right now is how Google is locking down the Android platform by making side loading mode difficult in the name of security. But more generally with the example of Android, how Google set the standard by providing frameworks and development tools in their terms, that become the defacto standard without any kind of industry wide consultation, is a big problem. My banking app use to have its own implementation of the NFC payment, it worked perfectly fine with GrapheneOS, now they updated the app and decided to just integrate the Google Wallet instead of maintaining their own implementation of the feature. Now it can’t be used with GrapheneOS. In this example, Google is in full control, and I, can’t do anything about it even if I am savvy enough to use custom ROM on my phone. Google didn’t act evil, they provide some tools and service, the bank didn’t act evil, they are just make technical choices that make financial sense, but in the end it contributes to take away our rights. I can either decide NFC payment with my phone is not worth signing a contract with Google and give up the feature, or I can decide my privacy is not worth the hassle and move back to the Google “certified” version of Android.
In the end, if a corporation can make more money, they will cease the opportunity. And they will absolutely make it illegal for you to own things or make choices if they have enough political leverage. Just look at all the DMCA and other anti “piracy” laws out there! In the USA it’s a federal crime to break a digital lock even on a product you bought and paid for ! It is defacto illegal to do what you please with something you “own”.
Pay no attention to the OS-level age verification laws they’re forcing down our throats, nothing to see here!
Yes, if I was a tech CEO I’d promote you for that idea right now!
This is exactly the plan. How can you not see it?
They’re not capable of long term planning like that. We can barely lay fiber in dense neighborhoods, and some places only get LTE. Imagine how much infrastructure would have to be built, billions of dollars of fiber means billions of dollars that aren’t going directly into the pockets of billionaires.
I remember it too, the dreaded thin clients are coming to kill your desktop. Honestly I’d love it if there was a viable option. You just can’t do it though - look at Stadia. Until graphics can be processed without a local card you’re only catering to net nanny’s and the slightly Amish. Ahhhh Web TV.
Have you heard about AWS and Azure?
Web servers have definitely moved from on-premises to the cloud, but there are also things that haven’t, and a lot of that was because of consumer pushback. Google Stadia was a flop, even though it was being talked about like it was a foregone conclusion that no one would want/need a console after Stadia came out.
I think that what workerONE is saying is probably right: the industry will let you own a powerful device (probably a heavily locked-down phone), and they’ll still be able to charge you for access to cloud storage and services. That’s the most profitable thing for them to do (and of course anti-consumer), so they’ll do it. They won’t need to prevent you from owning hardware, they can just charge you a monthly fee anyway, even though you have access to hardware yourself. The restrictive phone OS means you won’t even be able to do much with that powerful CPU in your pocket.
Stadia failed because it had huge issues with latency and video compression. Nvidia and Xbox are doing the same now and they do have people actually using it. The whole strategy from Microsoft is building a subscription gaming empire, both in software and hardware.
Yeah I worked in IT for 20 years managing servers and networks and have deployed servers in AWS.
$270 of the price is for the RAM.
No more cheap portable control stations for DIY projects for now. 😢
That’s what you get for trying to have fun instead of gaining value for shareholders.
This was part of the plan all along. They’re taking power directly from our hands in every way possible.
Well if size isn’t important you can still get just a regular motherboard for less, especially if it’s used.
Arduino?
It is a microcontroller, which has less computational power and used for other tasks usually.
To be fair, who needs 16GB of RAM on a Pi? The hell are you running on it that needs that? Are you trying to use it as a desktop?
Considering the 3 only had 2GB of ram, and the 4 only had 4GB of ram for the longest time, it’s probably better to compare the 8GB model. Which is still $135.
Even the 1GB model is $50. Fucking ridiculous.
Are you trying to use it as a desktop?
Why not. It has enough power. But you can easily consume all that RAM if you run Minecraft server, or crypto software
But why would you do that on a raspberry?
I mean if you have one already go ahead do your thing! But here we’re talking buying a new one.
At that price it’s really pointless.
But at normal prices, you can slap passive radiator on it, and have perfectly decent server for these things taped to the wall behind your desk. Zero noise, minimal power consumption, works reliably 24h
Yeah sure, those small pieces are marvels for stuff like that!
It actually saves you decent money compared to regular optiplex. In 24h work power savings translate into meaningfully lower electricity cost over the year.
I think mine is like 10 watts so not very expensive yearly, like 20€. And everyone forgets that for many, it’s just energy you’d use for heating anyways during many months of the year.
Yeah, but it’s only 100% efficient at best. Heat pumps are 200% - 400% so it is not really a 1 to 1 as far as heating. And in warm months you have to offset that heat so it very well could be a net loss.
Ehhhhh it kinda has enough power.
I have an 8GB Pi5 we use as a desktop in our living room. PiOS is sluggish to navigate, even though it’s an 8GB pi5 running off an NVMe SSD instead of a memory card. It’s just there to stream YT and Twitch and whatnot though, and it streams at 60FPS no problem once you’ve got the stream pulled up.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a desktop PC though, as navigating the OS and loading programs is not a great experience.
I have the 8 GB one.
I agree the 16 GB one is useless (especially how weak it is,I would rather buy a Optiplex or Thinkpad for that price with 16gb ram)Power efficiency is still a consideration. I am 100% for rehoming business waste. I have several optiplex and think station’s. Modern AMD and Intel are getting better. But still not there in efficiency. And older systems certainly aren’t. But sadly, at this point unless that or space are at a premium. For home lab use they are much less viable now.
Oh true.
Thats why i bought a rpi5 (when it was still 80 usd),I love how you can run it from a powerbank and a usbc screen concurrently.
Which am currently doing with mine.
I also like how you can make it portable.Yes I’m very interested in different ISAs myself. Looking to make a super portable system from an SBC. Although I’m waiting to see what these upcoming RVA23 RiscV SBCs are going to bring. And hopefully build something around one of them. If by the point they come out later this year Hardware just hasn’t become unaffordable entirely.
even at $135, what does a pi offer than i can’t solve with an refurb/off-lease corporate 1L minipc?
Low power consumption, GPIO pins, small form factor.
With 16GB you might just get away with a Jellyfin 10.11 instance.
No. I easily run that with 2gb RAM and over 60tb of shows.
The irony? 16GB is enough for running a mid-size LLM, to not connect up to the cloud.
There are use cases for it. If you have robotic applications that heavily rely on machine vision and image processing it might be needed. You can also upgrade the Raspberry pi 4 and 5 with this so called AI shield, to increase performance.
Good news is that micro controllers and used office PCs are still fairly affordable by comparison… for now.
I didn’t believe it, i mean they were pricey as hell but this is taking the biscuit now 😞
I feel pretty mixed about this to be honest. I haven’t bought a Pi in a long time but from what I can see the 5 is pretty clever. It’s expensive but RAM is insanely expensive right now. 16GB of RAM alone is expensive. That same RAM jump would cost thousands from Apple.
Meanwhile, the Pi 3 is still on sale for around £30, and the Pi Zero for closer to £10. If you genuinely want something for embedded systems or running scripts the older models are still fantastic for that. The Pi 5 is a viable desktop computer and just in a different category IMO.
The only thing i don’t like about the pi, is no x86. For a desktop i would much prefer x86 architecture.
So i am more looking for a low powered x86 home server as a secondary one.
I got mine 4 months ago for 120€ (including Power Plug, mini HDMI cable, Case and a Cooler/Fan)
edit for clarity
It was the Pi 5 with 8GB. The same kit now goes for 230€ which is still insane
Let’s be real they fumbled the bag a long time ago. They could easily have had their own supply chain for ram etc.
