Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)
Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.
On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?
“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.
From my experience, RPi might be more appealing since it runs a real OS and you can have a desktop environment.
> Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.
How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.