The cheapest rpi that isn’t a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.
The pi 5 won’t ever be $35 because that’s not the price point it was designed to hit. That’s why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold. Same for the pi3.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint. You want a $35 computer, that’s how much you get. The original pi was $35 and had 256mb of ram.
-edit also, $35 in 2012 is $47 today with inflation. The pi 4 is a crazy good deal and readily available. This complaint just has no merit.
I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?
And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?
Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.
A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.
I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.
There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.
That’s nice. Let me know when they’re $30 again.
Yea. I miss those days.
You can get the zero 2 w for 15-20
Yes that does seem like a compelling proposition but also a very different product.
The cheapest rpi that isn’t a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.
The pi 5 won’t ever be $35 because that’s not the price point it was designed to hit. That’s why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.
Can’t do much with 1GB. And the Pi4 isn’t part of a “product range”, it’s the previous generation product.
Of course the pi 4 is still part of the product range. It’s still being actively manufactured and sold. Same for the pi3.
As far as memory size, that wasn’t part of your original complaint. You want a $35 computer, that’s how much you get. The original pi was $35 and had 256mb of ram.
-edit also, $35 in 2012 is $47 today with inflation. The pi 4 is a crazy good deal and readily available. This complaint just has no merit.
I wouldn’t expect that kind of price anymore except for the Zero models.
I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
You know that RPi 5 actually does have PCIe, right?
And you know that RPI Zero 2W is as fast as an Raspberry pi 3, so plenty fast for the purpose you described, right?
And you know that the RPi 4 and 5 in particular are so fast that they can easily power your homelanb, 3d printer, smart home and NAS without breaking a sweat, right?
Yet they’re still inferior to even older x86 hardware. You can pick up a used NUC (or similar) for less than a pi 4 and it blows it out of the water on performance, while using only marginally more power.
I’d rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.
A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.
I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
Damn. Looked decent until I got to $30 on shipping.
That’s fine, but that means that it’s no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.
There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.
The pi 4 is literally $35 right now. The original pi, adjusted for inflation, was $47.