While I agree I'd like more open hardware (And Olimex comes to mind here as a vendor trying to deliver) but the reality is no one truly hits that fully open source benchmark for general purpose SBCs, yet.

This shouldn't disqualify the RPi, in my opinion. We're moving incrementally towards a world of open firmware and open hardware from a totally closed world. It feels like we're making forward progress. We shouldn't punish incremental steps on this path, nor should we stop asking for more open hardware.

As far as I know, the TI-based stuff (Beagle<foo> and others) is all open with the possible exception of the accelerated 3D video driver. I can get volume pricing and delivery dates on all parts. I can get documentation on latencies and functional units.

That's a pretty big difference.

All this means that people serious about a product have to avoid a RaspberryPi, and this is terribly unfortunate because it has such a wonderful community.

If you don't need any form of accelerated graphics then yeah, you don't want a pi and it's easier to get a more open board architecture. If you're making your own product tho it's way more likely you're not just gonna by someone else's board and jam it in there.

This feels like a dramatically different category of thing than what the Pi is, to the point where comparison starts to get less meaningful.

But frankly I'm not sure the RPi folks should give a damn. They're selling whole computers. That they don't fit into someone else's product pipeline is unsurprising.

It's like complaining you can't turn a MacBook air into a blade. It's true, but it's also a bit wrong to expect you could have in the first place.

> If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem.

For who?

Anybody trying to build a real product as opposed to a toy.

If I want to deliver a quarter million of these I can't.

If you have the financial and engineering resources to deliver a quarter of a million of anything, then the Raspberry Pi is completely irrelevant. Broadcom (or one of their rivals) will very happily work with you to develop your product.

The whole point of Raspberry Pi is to provide a convenient SBC for people who don't have those engineering resources. If you're somewhere in the middle, there's the Compute Module.

This is a feature. The manufacturer has made an intentional choice to not cater to people trying to build products with Pis. They're an educational non-profit.

Complaining about this is akin to complaining that your VW bus can't tow a house.

If you're building a real product, don't use hardware meant for education and tinkering.

Easy to say, but the reality is that you will be destroyed (or at least threatened) in the marketplace by your competitor who paid 1/4 what you did for an SBC.

If you're actually deploying 250,000 SBCs, I would imagine you could do a lot better than $35 a piece.

You might be surprised.

Remember that boards like the RPi are either loss leaders for the SoC vendor, or a way to offload excess capacity. Their pricing does not necessarily reflect what an actual customer for an actual SBC product will pay, regardless of scale.

You making profits off a charity organization is not the intended purpose of the Raspberry Pi foundation. Not getting 250k of those for your product is working as intended. You also shouldnt open a for profit restaurant cooking stuff you get from the food bank.

If you can't get a Pi in volume, how can your competitor?

The question isn't whether you can or can't, the question is whether your "real" product has a "real" controller board, for values of "real" that conform to the opinion of someone known as "rhinoceraptor" on Hacker News.

A competitor who doesn't worry about such details will have an advantage in many markets.

At one time, the denizens of a site called "Hacker News" might have been expected to grasp this idea intuitively.

You seem to have misunderstood rhinoceraptor's point given the context they've responded to.

The post they responded to said that the Raspberry Pi is unsuitable to all "real products" because they can't buy 250k of them - you might actually be arguing against their definition of "real product"? rhinoceraptor merely pointed out that that isn't the goal of the Raspberry Pi, and one thus should use something else if it doesn't fit the requirements. If that's your situation, your competitors will have the same problem. If it isn't, then "use something else" doesn't apply to you.

Have you looked at the cute pinkish red and white cases they sell, and the branding, and, well, everything? The raspberry pi is a toy. Just a really cool educational toy at that.

The compute modules aren't toys though.

They are used in industry already (digital signage particularly).

And their messaging around those is correspondingly quite different.

There are a couple of options available to you. You can use the compute module or contract Element14 to manufacture a customized raspberry pi for you.

But as others have said it is not a problem as far as the Raspberry Pi foundation is concerned because their primary mission isn't to produce a board for use in commercial products.

I too wish you could get pi's in quantity.

For similar systems in quantity, a guy I know used toradex

I don't know about your local distributor, but RS Components will sell you as many as you like; they've currently got 47,400 3B+ boards in stock, no maximum order and a price break at full box quantities (150).

Toradex modules need just one or two voltages. RPi compute modules need like... five or so? Much extra circuitry. Toradex modules also have availability guarantees. I've seen both reasons rule out RPi compute modules.