Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February

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.

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.

Can't do much with 1GB. And the Pi4 isn't part of a "product range", it's the previous generation product.

Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.

And now that they're finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they've jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.

Don't forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they're the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.

That's just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi's for surveillance..

• Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.

Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)

That is so dump.

Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.

Picked up a laptop with a busted screen $30 cheaper than the RPI 5. 1135G7, 8gb upgradable ram, m.2 storage, wifi, bluetooth and a battery.

Raspberry pis' were great early on, but their appeal has quickly diminished in my eyes considering used hardware options that are available now.

Size would be the one redeeming quality of a raspberry pi for me, my headless laptop is thin but takes up substantially more space.

Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.

The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.

If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.

I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.

The integrated GPU is pretty good though.

Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.

There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.

I'm assuming it's like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn't really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it's not too bad.

Thank you very much for pointing this out! It seems I‘ll have to read up on this stuff for my next home automation project.

I used a lepotato on my last project in place of a pi3 but libre computer totally has rockchip boards available as well. Price wise seemed decent, documentation was decent enough for me and more importantly I could actually get one.

What's the problem with it?

4GB of DDR4 is a lot worse than 8GB of DDR3. Those (slightly) older business SFF computers are plenty capable compared to the pi and their software support is at least as strong.

You're also going to have to add several peripherals to the pi that aren't included in the price.

Is it possible to get these pi's for that price now though? Because I member 2 years ago looking at paying rediculous scalper pricing for a pi to run octoprint on, and by the grace of my brother having a spare one was able to avoid spending 150 bucks on scalper bullshit.

It comes with built in storage and a power supply, plus a passive cooling system, a case obviously, and removable RAM up to 16gb. It has dual display port, idk about resolution, I run it headless anyway. There is also a bigger version with a pice slot.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04017240

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125917442953?

Yeah that's valid for that use case. Good thing they still allow the jumper

I’m not the one you replied to, but I bought an Odroid when it was difficult to get a pi. I wouldn’t say it’s in the same category. It’s bigger, more expensive than normal pi prices and more powerful. It’s probably perfect for what you’re looking for. Where you might run into trouble is if you have very tight power consumption requirements or plan to use add on boards.