Who would buy a Raspberry Pi for $120?

You develop your application on an 8GB model and find out that 16GB is much better. You can choose to port it to some other OS with some other hardware if you like or buy a 16GB Pi 5 and save the effort. The choice is now there.<p>What&#x27;s so great is that it&#x27;s all up to you. There are &quot;smaller&quot; or older Pis still being made. More for more is fairly reasonable.<p>If you have a sort of inbuilt bias against &quot;buying second best&quot; that you might consider this a price increase. I have that feeling often. I don&#x27;t want the second best camera .... and that ends up leading me into stratospheric prices as I finds better and better things. Fortunately I know this and realise that when I am doing it it&#x27;s because I don&#x27;t have a clear use in mind for the item - hence I can&#x27;t decide what&#x27;s &quot;enough&quot; so the answer is not to buy it at all.

The lesson I&#x27;ve learned over the years of purchasing several Raspberry Pi&#x27;s is this: Unless you&#x27;re in the need to integrate a project through the GPIO&#x27;s interface I would be better off spending on one of those (second hand) mini-pcs by lenovo, dell, etc. Even if you want to use it for a low budget mini server, performance for the buck is way better off with a mini pc.

The Raspberry Pi has been a bad deal for a long time now. Persistent shortages drove the real-world price up (no one was selling them for MSRP) and for some reason they never came back down.<p>Cheap tiny PCs are better at the high end, and increasingly-capable microcontrollers are better for tinkering. The Pi sits in a weird niche, and its popularity these days is largely based on inertia and network effects.<p>It&#x27;s been a slow, strange shift away from a $25 computer meant for kids to learn programming and electronics.

The bigger question to my mind is why does 14GB of RAM cost $70?<p>2GB Pi5 - $50 16GB Pi5 - $120<p>I can see the uses of having more RAM, but surely it&#x27;s cheap enough to make 4GB standard, with options for 8&#x2F;16GB that are sensibly priced - removing one SKU.

I&#x27;m in Hungary and for the equivalent of $120 you can get an enterprise refurbished mini PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo) with a much better CPU (i3-8100T, i5-8500T, i3-10100T for example) and storage options here. I&#x27;m running Dell Optiplex Micros with triple SSDs (1x 2.5&quot;, 2x NVMe). And it&#x27;s x86 so you can prety much run whatever OS you want without any problems. The power consumption is perfectly fine too. Mines usually idle around 4-5W.<p>Good article about the same topic <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;louwrentius.com&#x2F;the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a-tini-mini-micro-pc.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;louwrentius.com&#x2F;the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...</a> Even a 10 years old i5-6500 is outperforming the RPI5!

When my Macbook Pro suddenly died while I was travelling, I was surprised I could productively use my Rpi4+ that I had with me as a temporary replacement. I set up VSCode to use Remote-SSH, and was doing all compilation&#x2F;development on a cheap Vserver (&lt;15€&#x2F;mo). VSCode ran quite well locally on the RPI. This was a good temp. replacement for a couple of weeks, now I keep my RPI as an emergency device with me in case my main laptop dies again.

&gt; But I distilled my thoughts into a list of 5 reasons the 16 GB Pi 5 ought to exist:<p>Another reason why one might want to buy one is as a build server for arm64 packages.

My response on the other article:<p>Outside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.

&gt; And for stats nerds, the pricing model for Pi 5 follows this polynomial curve almost perfectly<p>If you actually use the memory as the input instead of 1, 2, 3, 4 then a line would fit it perfectly (40 + 5x).

Just finally putting my model B version 1 into action. Cost £10. *<p>It is doing everything I want: running https, http, websockets, and monitoring a USB device using python. No GUI. I tried on an esp device but it proved to be too hard to keep those plates spinning. It&#x27;s the right device for the right job. That&#x27;s the rule.<p>* I am willing to corrected about the price!

I love the idea of low power computing, but I have seen rpi 2 and 3 fail so many times (microsd technology is unreliable, cpu fries at room temperature, gpio randomly stops producing voltage) over the years, no idea why this brand still exists and sells products. Maybe it is just me.

A masochist.<p>I&#x27;ve ranted about this before on HN so won&#x27;t too much now, but suffice to say over the years I&#x27;ve tried to use a Pi for multiple different projects, and it&#x27;s very rare that anything ever <i>just works</i>, even following apparently clear tutorials. I always run into issues somewhere installing packages from the linux and&#x2F;or python ecosystems.<p>If all you need is a base Raspbian install, fair enough; but anything more complicated and you&#x27;re likely heading for a world of hurt, trying random &#x27;solutions&#x27; from years-old Ubuntu forum and StackOverflow posts.

a closer comparison would be the sbc with n100 chip. they are roughly same price<p>but n100 sbc offer much better performance, and power consumption as well<p>&gt; I managed to get my N100 mini pc to 1.3-1.5W idle power consumption at wall with active wifi connection (screen turned off), so for headless server idling most of the time the N100 is better option.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnx-software.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;29&#x2F;raspberry-pi-5-intel-n100-mini-pc-comparison-features-benchmarks-price&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnx-software.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;29&#x2F;raspberry-pi-5-intel...</a>

IMHO The 5 should have been a separately-branded product line because it&#x27;s not the best fit, cost-wise for someone just doing blinky, sensory, roboty stuff that would work fine with a 3 or 4.

I recently needed some tiny server to bridge a printer to airprint &#x2F; network scanner etc. Immediately thought about rpi as I could simply plug it in and probably tape it to the back of said printer indefinitely. Seeing the ridiculous pricing on new PIs, went ahead and grabbed a NUC like mini PC. I mean it was the same price as an rpi + memory card, had a nice case with a fan, power management etc. Has shit specs but what do I care for this use case.<p>If I don&#x27;t need GPIO, PI does not seem to make much sense anymore.

What everyone is missing with NUC suggestions is that none of them are ARM based, which is a selling point to get a Pi and port software to ARM in what is a convenient desktop experience.

For PC-like applications I would tend to agree. A quick look at prices here in the UK:<p>* Rpi5 16GB - £114.90 (Pi Hut)<p>* Mini PC N150, 16GB (upgradable), 512GB M.2 SSD (upgradable), Win 11 Pro - £169.95 (Amazon)

Second hand NUCs cost 70 bucks, sometimes even lower and offer way more bang for buck than a RPi. Use an adafruit breakout for usb -&gt; GPIO and you&#x27;re good.

There is definitely a market for it - though a small one.<p>I had a 3x pi cluster and found the 8GB limiting. So made those the controlling nodes and bought orange pis 32gb for the worker nodes. And those were well north of 120.<p>But that kind of usage case is quite niche. For most people minipcs are probably a better fit in that price class.<p>I&#x27;m unconvinced by the LLM argument...even if the model fits...it&#x27;s already slow for 8GB class models.

Unless you need a small form factor and GPIO, I don’t think the Raspberry Pi is a good deal anymore. A Raspberry Pi, SSD, case, and power adapter would be much more expensive than well-known N100 mini PC brands like Beelink and Minis Forum. However, they still have low power consumption. So my answer is no. (Was a happy RPI4 user but now much more happy with mini pc&#x27;s)

I really don’t know. A second-hand tiniminimicro or a nuc-like seems so much more value for money<p>Jeffs reasons why you’d need 16G in a Pi feel convoluted.

With 16gb you can run virtuals to segment CPU time with memory commits.<p>With 16gb you can have a massive file buffer cache and avoid disk io delay.

I wouldn&#x27;t. I bought all RasPi boards from 1 to 4, which served me for tinkering and as media player, then realized I could do the same for cheap on a much faster mini PC or unlocked Chromebox, and when I need GPios there&#x27;s a good choice of cheaper&#x2F;faster and more open boards from other vendors.

These tiny PC with 4&quot; boards have changed the game. Pi is sort of in-between the Arduino and these. As article points out the price difference is not much.<p>I bought 4B and found it slow, hot. Thanks to COVID I could resell it for a tidy profit lol. Of course there are use cases I can imagine.

Arm nixpkgs build server is one reason i can think of. (But then 16gb is still almost to little)

With half that price (even less), I saw used but decent laptops.

Related:<p><i>New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42642873">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42642873</a>

RK3588S has been available for several years and supports 32GB RAM. OrangePi 5 and NanoPi M6 each use it. The later sells with 32GB RAM for $192. I&#x27;m still using a BCM2835 RPi with 512MB RAM. Boots to RAM-based root filesystem; .profile automatically chroots to a large external drive.

Is there a similarly priced, more powerful ARM based computer available (for power efficiency I would like ARM only)? A year ago I decided to go for a mac mini for around $500 as it&#x27;s way more powerful (except for RAM, there it&#x27;s constrained but that&#x27;s ok if you don&#x27;t attach a display).

I&#x27;ve been saying this for almost 2 years now. The raspberry pi was awesome when it first appeared. But given the competition today, <i>especially</i> the Intel mini PCs from one million vendors on Amazon, it became a relic of the past for all but a handful of applications - and these wouldn&#x27;t need the 16gb model.<p>What makes me sad is the relative failure of the 400&#x2F;500 concept. I miss the portable all-in-ones from the 80s. But the difficulty in putting a SSD inside and the infuriating mini HDMI were the nail in the coffin.

An oldish laptop would be better. Might get 4 in this price :S