The reason that safety briefings on every single plane take-off is not because people might be flying for the first time- it's to reiterate important points to bury important information in your mind despite not using it.

Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.

The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.

This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.

1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education

2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.

3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".

Your post just highlights the extreme absurdity of these urgent "my God, don't you know about mini PCs!" and "you could just buy a used computer on eBay!" posts that accompany every Raspberry Pi announcement. You really believe you're offering a safety briefing.

sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I was suggesting that this kind of comment is akin to a “safety briefing” - in so far as it makes you safer.

What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s very easy for mundane information to be lost and so it bears repetition.

I don’t believe I’m offering a safety briefing, I believe the author is making the point that if you’re looking for something to host a service, you will be better served with something more suitable to the task. And not something that is designed for something completely different; constraining the supply and making things more expensive and difficult than they need to be

I feel like it kind of needs to be said, ever since RaspberryPis stopped being price-competitive. Most of the original sales pitch for why you should adopt an extremely weird proprietary ARM-variant was centred on price.

Is that really true? I thought the pitch was always, pretty much in order:

• GPIO for hacking - basically an Arduino but a real computer

• Low power use (practical to run from a battery for some purposes)

• Tiny form-factor

Price seemed to be more of an "it doesn't matter that much if you break it while hacking with it" factor than a reason-to-buy.

"Low cost" is/was part of their mission.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio...

That's very interesting.

Incidentally that slide deck mentions the pi zero - which is still very cheap (the 2w is about $20 where I live), so I guess they're still honouring that even if their fancy one is pricy-ish.

Edit: I also found this article from before the original pi release https://hackaday.com/2011/05/06/miniature-pc-packs-a-big-pun...

The comments in that thread are very focused on the price point (many doubting it could hit $25, which it actually did reach) so I stand corrected; it was clearly part of both the marketing and the attraction.

I think most people buying RPis for the GPIO would be better served by a small microcontroller devboard like the Arduino Uno acting as the intermediary between the computer and the wires. This way if anything goes wrong (overvoltage, short) then the Arduino takes the impact and is much cheaper to replace.

It's become a dual-use device, hence the obligatory comparisons.

I think the problem with your bullet points is that something like an ESP32 beats a Pi at all of these criteria (as well as on cost), and can be wired/wirelessly tethered to whatever PC you have handy if you actually need a bunch of compute.

With the exception of the Zero, Pi has always been playing in the realm of "this is a real computer, except cheaper". And that's a pretty crowded space these days.

All of these are true (even more so) for the Pi Zero.

Why would someone buy a Pi5 when they can get more power for the same price?

The discussion is how RPi raised its price close to a PC rather than one of a hobbyist board

It needs to be said as long as RPI's are this expensive they were supposed to be VERY cheap SBC's and instead they're approaching and in some cases exceeding full commercial boxed products

Because there are a shocking number of folks that don’t realize just how cheap you can get a used mini-pc off eBay. And if the only thing you’re missing is gpio that can easily be added.

And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.

Every topic has typical comments that are predictable.

Like clockwork.

The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.

Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:

"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"

Dudes. It's not the same picture.

And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.

> Like clockwork. [...] The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi [...] Dudes. It's not the same picture.

In sum, there are two groups of users who have purchased/considered the R.Pi products: (a) people who have homelab infrastructure, (b-c) people who enjoy a learning platform and may also like the Pi 400 and Pi 500.

The R.Pi's support and community are worth the increased cost.

> "Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"

Cheers for the laugh. ^_^