this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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While there are now X86 SBC / Mini Computers that aren't far off the Pi in price, the real benefits of the Pi aren't just the fact that it offers a certain amount of compute for a certain price.
It's still lower power than most x86 SBCs overall, which matters with portable/remote applications
Its schematics are usually available
They're easy to get and have a usually guaranteed availability, so when one dies you should be able to get another
its got a decent ecosystem around it of hardware and software, which basically nobody else can claim
it's a fairly standard form factor, so fits into existing stuff well.
It's likely we will see a compute module for the Pi 5 as well at a guess, which means you can treat the vanilla Pi 5 as a dev board for whatever product you're developing, and then use a potential CM5 as the core of your product once it's ready to go!
If all you need is a home server or a Linux box, then sure get an X86 SBC, but the Pi isn't irrelevant, not by a long shot! Congratulations on releasing yet another sweet spot product, I'll be picking one up as soon as I think of a use for one!
Easy to get?
Supposedly because there's no through hole components, everything is surface mount, it should be much easier to manufacturer.
When I say easy to get, I don't necessarily mean "in stock" - and that is obviously a huge consideration. What I do mean that as far as I know the Pi foundation plans to keep manufacturing older boards for a long time since some customers can't just easily upgrade to the latest Pi, let alone move to a whole new platform. Is the Beelink x86 PC you got last week going to still be for sale without any significant revisions in 6 months?
Clearly a bot.
There are bots on lemmy? I thought I escaped the bots...
Lol I assure you I'm no bot. I just think that people forget that the Pi fills a niche that I know many self hosty types like myself no longer need it to fill, and the Pi 5 imo is another slam dunk in terms of nailing filling that particular niche. Other ARM SBCs tend to always have trouble with GPU hardware acceleration due to the weird MediaTek or rockchip SoCs they have or end up pinned to some ancient kernel version missing sources.
I too moved away from Pis to an X86 setup (https://kn100.me/erying-11800h/) something I talk about in great detail in that blog post, but appreciate the Pi exists and continues to evolve in the way it is. Not everything is about mac compute per dollar for everybody!
That sounds like something a bot would say!
I wanted to get a rpi4 when they were nowhere to be found. I refused to pay a scalper so I ended up with a few rockchip devices. I like tinkering and trying different things with them. I made one into an android streaming / dvr / emulation box. I turned a low power one into a pi hole. And I have an orange pi 5 that I still don't know what I want tondo with it.
I don't have any need for another x86_64 device. I have plenty of them already. That being said, I probably won't buy a rpi5 either. Or at least I won't rush to buy one.
Beep Boop I'm in ur Lemmys astroturfin ur as yet unavailable SBCs.
Nah in all seriousness I too don't need a pi 5. I just respect what the people behind the Pi project are doing, and it upsets me that people are mad about what is in my opinion a very solid evolution of the Pi because of the availability issues of the Pi 4 during the largest supply shortage the world has seen in ALL consumer goods, not just hobbyist SBCs. Yes that sucked, but there were shortages in virtually everything else too. They also happen to be manufactured in my hometown which means they get a special place in my heart.
Brb sifting thru ur data and targeting ads.
They're manufactured in the UK right? You should probably go to bed!
The GPU crunch was way more painful for me. I waited as long as I could and even went igpu for a year. Finally I overpaid for a nvidia gpu that never played nice with slackware / wayland. It ended up forcing me to replace it with an amd gpu recently. Wanna buy a gently used 3060 ti?
Please serve me more beer and liquor ads. I haven't had a drink in almost a decade but that's all I seem to see when I'm not on my pi-hole filtered home network.
My bad then. The formatting looked like typical AI opening-bullet-list-closing. I stand corrected.
You're probably right, ashamed I didn't notice though