Ouch. I was hesitant at $160. This is just a no. I’ll buy one if prices ever become sane again.
Everyone here talking about raspberry pi and I still to this day have no idea what I can do with one.
I use them to run Kodi for streaming media to my TV from my file server. I also would like to run retropie but I can’t figure out how to get the scaling to work on my TV.
It’s just a computer. You can do whatever you need a computer for. Browse Lemmy on it. Play video games on it. Use it as a server. Make it run an ad video on the TV in your store window.
Whatever you need a PC for. If you don’t need a PC for something, you don’t need a Raspberry Pi.
The entire point of the Raspberry Pi was that it was a very very cheap PC, and it’s no longer cheap, so nowadays there is definitely less reason to buy one.
That is just one of the possible uses and not the most important one. Pi’s have two things that regular PCs don’t have. They have a direct integration of an I/O port where you can easily connect individual wires as needed and they have a huge community and a lot of tutorials and also software support for all kinds of tinker jobs that can make use of that I/O port.
These two reasons have not gone away and for many of those, you don’t need the most expensive PI with 16GB of RAM. A Pi Zero for 14 EUR or a Pi Zero 2 for 22 EUR are perfectly fine for that. The platform has plenty of life left but those high end Pi are increasingly crazily priced, mainly because of insane RAM prices.
It’s also a very small and low powered computer. That’s valuable in some cases.
And most of them have a GPIO (general-purpose input/output) header for whatever shenanigans people might be up to.
You can buy used sff/micro computers on eBay for half that.
Yeeeeee eah, I priced one out a couple weeks ago from my preferred, local supplier and immediately left the site. It’s a shame because I have some Pi3b and a 4 that I’d love to retire. Still functional, but pokey.
I’m betting tied of being priced-out of everything
Jesus! I bought mine for $29.95 about 15 years ago.
My first Pi was a Zero. It came free with a PC magazine. It was taped to the cover. I think the retail price then was something like $5
Pi Zeros sell nowadays for 13 EUR. I don’t know when you got yours but it might be just regular inflation since then.
You probably meant a Pi 1 which even though does share the name is in terms performance is a lot more than 10x better, see e.g. https://the-diy-life.com/raspberry-pi-drag-race-pi-1-to-pi-5-performance-comparison/
I’m not saying anybody needs a RPi 5 … but it’s also not fair to compare to something related yet different.
I don’t understand the hate towards the makers of the Pi. Obviously they didn’t raise the price because they’re greedy.
Fuck Apple, but one thing you need to give them credit for is that over years they didn’t raise their prices once, they even lowered them for the iPhone at one point. And even they needed to raise the prices.
Blame the memory manufacturers for creating a fake shortage because they don’t want to ramp up their production capabilities because they like the high demand.
You want to bring Apple in this? Apple, with the devices that are three-four times as expensive as they should have to be, built with sub-par quality components, because of course, whilst going so far as to adding crypto keys to their hardware to ensure you can’t repair it?
I’m not sure that Apple is a good example to use here. They just announced their new MacBook - starting at $3,000. Their new cell phone starts at $2,000.
Apple already sells overpriced devices and other manufacturers are doing the same, this time, in the name of inflation and memory shortages.
So much for being cheap and for educational purposes.
I get how parts prices and everything else got more expensive… but that’s just insane. Most I’ve ever paid for a Pi was 40 euros for a model 3. They’ve gotten way too expensive since then. The WHOLE IDEA behind them was cheap and cheerful computing. Did a lot of cool projects with them that just aren’t worth it with expensive hardware.
Whoa that’s crazy. Happy that my pi 1 and 2 are still happily chugging along
The only reason I’ve ever used Raspberry Pis is because they’re cheap as hell. I think $45 is the most I’ve ever paid for one. Fuck this.
Yeah, I bought the original Pi 1 (B, o think?) and every version up to a 4, and one zero. I now use them for things like driving my 3d printer, pi hole etc.
I gifted my son a Pi5, and soon regretted it, as I later found out that the fuckers were not using standard USB C power, but a proprietary version of USB C. Fuck their enshitified souls.
Yup. They gave up on their mission to provide high quality chips at low prices a while back. I still have a Pi4 in use. I have a couple of 3B and 0+. But they’re so slow, I’m only going to use them where I need a full computer instead of something like an ESP32. Needless to say, those are all sitting on the shelf because ESP32s are capable of running most of what I need.
May as well just buy a used laptop or desktop.
Used Mini PCs, brand name, like Lenovo tinys, are now my go to. Slightly larger, but orders of magnitude more capable, and often power sippy.
They still make use of desktop CPUs that can pull 120W when idling and up to 250W under heavy loads. So light on power? Maybe. But power sippy? Not against an M4 Mac, which can be as little as ⅙ as much under a similarly heavy load.
Or a mini pc. 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME ~$300.
Power consumption.
Honestly this is a sad point. The SBC trend was going ti remarkly small idle power comsumption.
Electricity is green.
A Lenovo tiny use something like 4 w idle to 40w peak.
Good luck when that market gets squeezed too.
Good thing there is so much old crap out there
For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.
But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.
Unfortunate how bad the last 7 or so years have been market wise for the raspberry pi project. It feels like every time the hardware on one end gets cheaper, some other tech fad squeezes another component price up.
Who’s the complete fucking idiot buying them at that price? Surely no one is that desperate.
The base model of Pi5 is $45 USD.
The 16 gig Pi 5 us $385 USD.
If you are using 16 gigs, you should probably using different hardware.
Definitely. A used mini PC is way faster than a Pi.
Seriously what the fuck. I thought these things were $25. I haven’t followed tech since last the last time I built a PC in 2022; I can’t believe the chip shortage has gotten this bad. (Fucking AI)
They basically still are, it’s just the advanced models with extra RAM. A Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM is a perfectly decent PC, and for the price, in the current market, is good. If you want a Pi to use the way you used to… That’s still in the region you were thinking. I bought a bunch of Pi 3s for a project recently, cost about £30 each.
I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!
And here I thought I was being stupid paying $1600 for a 4090 back then. Jesus Fucking Christ, $12K for a GPU!? That’s 1980s prices! Guess I won’t be upgrading for a long time… (edit: not that I need to anytime soon, lol. This card is a beast)
To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.
An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)
I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.
Man I remember getting pissed I couldnt get a Pi4 for less than $50, paid $30 for my Pi3
It is now, just a shitty computer. It used to be a learning platform, but that price tag is not a learning price.
It became somewhat inevitable once companies started buying mass amounts of Pis for every purpose because they were so cost-efficient.
It used to be an education nonprofit, but it effectively became an industrial SBC supplier.
By now we’ve learned not to buy RPi again
