If you use the raspberry pi for homeservers or general compute (which I did/do sometimes) then the value proposition is quite poor regardless of pre AI prices unless you have very strict power requirements (in which case it probably fits the above use case already). The comparison with NUCs or mini PCs or laptop boards feels like it's a wrong comparison.
The chips used in PIs are repurposed Broadcom SOCs that have inferior bus speeds compared to a general purpose processor from intel or amd, even few generations old. For any general purpose computing these chips will always be slower. its like comparing apples and oranges. I never really understood why people did that.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but I would argue the Raspberry was always an applorange, and that's exactly what made it popular (together with the cheap price in the beginning, which made it basically an impulse buy). It brought people into microcontroller/embedded systems territory without having to actually deal with all of the stuff that made this so daunting. As you said, it is basically a normal Linux PC, just that it runs Arm and has GPIO. People who are really into electronics/embedded systems will use a proper microcontroller nowadays anyway, these have gotten so powerful and easy to use that there's really no reason for a Pi anymore. And on the other side, people who want a little server, a pi-hole, tailscale or octoprint or whatever, can just use an old used laptop/miniPC or similar. Since the Pi has gotten so expensive, I see basically no reason to get one anymore.
By the way, I got a zero 2W a few months ago and it costed me 47€
You can make such a dongle yourself from ~any MCU dev board, but there are also productized "USB GPIO breakout" adapter boards, e.g. the Adafruit MCP2221A.
The "Pi as an SBC with GPIOs" case now only makes sense if you really, really require the Pi's compactness and/or monolithic-ness (as might be the case for e.g. ruggedized embedded systems like robots.)
For many (maybe even most) people they do the same thing. Some just want a HTPC, basic desktop, or small server, no GPIO needed. Raspberry Pis were definitely cheaper early on because you could actually buy boards at or near MSRP, but over time the price rose and mini PCs became cheaper.
or maybe the mini pcs started becoming available at all. I think these were a concept since core 2 duo and first gen i3 era. before then the chips were too much wattage for a mini pc. and the first generation mini pcs were also costly for enterprises to adopt in bulk. its only after 4th and 6th gen intel that these were adopted in large quantities in enterprises and once they dumped those in the used market they became comparable in pricing and somewhat in power to a rpi.
Used powerful PCs have always been available for dirt cheap on eBay even when the first pi was launched. just that mini pcs are a more recent thing.
As far as mini-pcs... The first Intel NUC was a Sandy bridge, i.e. Gen2, FWIW. And we did have the 'Mac Mini' as far back as 2005, buuuuut that wasn't cheap because Apple.
I think SSDs were another big part of mini-PCs though; it's easy to forget for granted the risks of having a hard drive in a poor thermal environment, as well as the general size constraints one imposes. [0]
[0] - Surrrre, you could use a 2.5 inch HDD instead, but 2.5 inch HDDs almost always were slower than a 3.5 inch HDD (excluding the VelociRaptor, but that would only be more demanding as far as thermal...)
At first it was a blessing that the Raspberry Pi gained popularity as a general purpose computer, not just for education and embedded applications. The additional demand and popularity brought more money and development attention to the ecosystem.
At some point, which I could never really put my finger on, this general purpose computer popularity grew so large that the embedded systems and educational aspects of Raspberry Pi seemed almost forgotten by the mainstream users. At a local in-person meetup group it was a running theme for people to brag about how many Raspberry Pis they owned for different purposes and to boast about using them for applications where they didn’t really fit. In person I’ve heard more about Raspberry Pi NAS systems (where people are always disappointed with the performance and the price of forcing a Pi into this role) or Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters (which mostly sat idle and could have been replaced by a single PC with more RAM).
This reached such a critical mass that it almost seemed like the mainstream discussion forgot the original purpose of the Pi and thought it was literally just another computer, but small. Most people who tried to use it for this purpose were left slightly frustrated by how it didn’t perform like they wanted a computer to perform.
So now every discussion about Raspberry Pi attracts comments about how nobody should buy a Pi when you can buy a NUC or laptop or some other used piece of hardware and it’s so much “better”. This is the right advice for a lot of people who wanted a powerful general computer but bought a Pi instead, but it’s also furthering the misunderstanding of what the Pi is for.
The real advice is that everyone should be shopping for the right tool for the job. There are a lot of cool applications for the Pi where a NUC or old laptop or phone doesn’t make sense because you actually need the compact size, the low-level I/O, or some other feature. However anyone who can put a NUC or laptop side by side with a Raspberry Pi and consider them both viable options for their project probably shouldn’t have been looking at a single board computer to begin with.
There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.
I have mixed feelings on that.
For the longest time it was safe to say "just buy a Raspberry Pi" because they were cheap enough and powerful enough. If memory serves me correctly, the base board cost roughly the same as an Arduino Uno and offered considerably more. (Of course, there were cheaper Uno clones, but those depended upon support offered by official Arduino software development tools.)
While there are some projects which would only be possible with something like the Uno, there were far more projects that would only be possible with something like the Pi. So if you wanted to give generic go-to advice to a novice, the Pi it was.
The right advice is to use the right tool for the job, but that is something that a novice (or fly-by-night forum posters) aren't prepared to handle.
Of course, things change. There are more inexpensive microcontroller development boards and the microcontrollers themselves are much more powerful. While that doesn't negate the benefits of a Linux SBC, it does raise questions now that those SBCs are considerably more expensive.
Suddenly the Kodi and the GPIO crowd (Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32, etc.) could work with the same board.
A new era, like the IBM PC or the iPhone. Changed computing forever.
EDIT: like other commenters noted, it seems like it made the intel NUC a reality.
IMO, the problem with the Pi GPIO is that it's a collection of GPIO pins and low pin count buses for controlling peripherals, rather than a singular bus. The fact that it runs Linux without an RTOS monitor program or a sidecar of sorts adds to the problem.
Fantastic for one-off projects.
Nowadays they require cooling fans and cost absurd amounts considering the performance so there seems little point.
Most of my one off projects these days are now on microcontrollers.
In a better world we'd all have one in our homes, storing all our personal data and documents. The cloud would only be used for storing encrypted backups.
Many small businesses, kindergartens etc. could also have all their digital needs served this way.
Yes they would sometimes break down, but with the right setup, the fix would be a matter of booting a replacement from the right thumbdrive.
I have a Nextcloud server running on it and the maintenance is negligible.
During the recent PHP-vulnerability I simply turned it off. The next day I booted it, and it automatically installed the new Nextcloud image with the vulnerability fixed.
Makes me wonder if I could have it check for CVEs and automatically shut down vulnerable containers until updated images are out.
May I ask, how do you think kindergartens would benefit from a home server?
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Cabinet-Equipment-RackMate-Ra...
This let me standardize on amd64 and simplified a bunch of my deploy code.
Of course, there are a wealth of hardware options out there, so it varies. I've heard as low as 4 watts.
btop says CPU takes 1W when "idle" (seeding some torrents), no idea what the rest of the board and NVMe could take.
Can you explain this a bit? What is the application/use-case where the power adapters are a problem?
Old mobile phones or laptops are riskier because of batteries. Some laptops can work without batteries as well, but do old phones?
Intel MacBook Pro from 2014 works but throttles the CPU to 800 Hz making it barely usable.
I have a ThinkPad x230 (3rd gen i7) which makes an incredible Windows XP nostalgia device. It’s basically the newest hardware that exists with full XP drivers (other than USB3 which I don’t need) so it’s massively OP, which was the point of that project. Basically, “what if I had access to insanely futuristic hardware in 2002.”
Obviously I wouldn’t sacrifice that hardware but it might be cool to try that on yet another laptop. (Hey, I don’t have a laptop collecting problem!)
they did, with modifications
I feel like The Internet has this urban myth that says keeping a charged battery plugged in all the time will eventually cause it to explode and burn your house down, guaranteed.
I get that keeping a battery at 100% charge is not great for it in terms of longevity (ability to hold a charge). And it's obvious that heating the battery up by running the laptop at full tilt inside a backpack or something will turn it into a spicy pillow.
But I struggle to imagine the failure mode that reliably shows up when keeping the laptop powered on 24x7 that is never a problem for 8-16 hours of continuous use while plugged in (a very typical work day for my laptops).
I ended up repairing the Mac, replacing the battery, and installing Chrome OS on it. (chrome sucks though, someday I’ll get it back out and switch to real Linux)
I had a MacBook Pro where the laptop worked but the battery became swollen so much that it distorted the case. If I wasn't there to notice it, it would probably burst at some point and Lithium is very flammable.
It's probably rare and overblown, but it can happen.
If that had been in a closet, it would have been months or years before I realized.
for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps.
'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products.
Batteries degrade much faster when fully cycled repeatedly, and even then just about any laptop battery can easily make it 6+ years with low-to-zero risk of failure.
Apple documented the behavior in a support note. I’m not sure if the Apple Silicon models do the throttling as well. I guess the situation doesn't come up as often since the batteries are no longer user-removable.
> Unless you're just doing it for the love of the game
Isn't that way a lot of people do the home-lab thing and related projects what would need the Pi these ideas are talking about replacing? It is why I do it [or used to be before working in tech for decades killed a lot of the enjoyment I had for playing with tech].
> or happen to have a lot of laptop boards sitting around you can sell
You are the first in this thread to bring up what any of this is worth on a larger scale, selling the results. Everyone else is talking about putting together one simple computer or jumped-up microcontroller for a task of their own, and maybe more later for other projects. Some of us find this sort of thing fun, and in the shit world we are all living in right now having a bit of fun and achieving something [sort of] practical out of it, can be priceless.
For my malware home lab, I decided to just reuse old phones and routers that nobody wanted anymore (quite literally got them from the trash bins). Now they're running an ARMv8 kernel as the host kernel and the rest is emulated or containerized, depending on the use case.
Works like a charm for most tasks I throw at it, and many old cheap Android phones have at least quad or octa cores in them, making them pretty awesome for podman/docker usage, too.
The only thing you have to look out for is to remove the battery, and that you use a separate power circuit with a step down converter to power it. But other than that, old smartphones have become amazing for selfhosting stuff now.