On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 10:48:21AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via Talk wrote:
Is the Raspberry Pi still a thing? I suggest its moment has come and gone. It has growth to date but I suggest that this is as good as it's going to be.
A Pi 5 16GB board alone costs upwards of $175. That's more than an off-lease Dell with an i7 and a 1TB hard disk. Once you add the case, cooling, storage and power supply you're firmly into the world of Beelink and GMKtec for a brand new system. Less RAM (non-upgradeable) can save a few dollars, but what's the point?
As for the supposed angel benefits of the RPi Foundation being non-profit, piffle on that. When I was involved with a nonprofit trying to establish a partnership with them some years ago they turned out to be absolute arrogant pricks to work with; more cult leaders than community supporters. Commercial competitors were far more eager to collaborate.
At this point it seems to me that anyone using an RPi who isn't taking advantage of the GPIO header is something of a masochist, bearing all the continuing limitations of the ARM SBC ecosystem with little comparative benefit in return. I say this as the owner of two PIs that appreciated their role in creating the category, but that moment is past.
Certainly if you don't need gpio then there are probably other options that make more sense. If you just want a power efficient thing to run a bit of code on, they are still pretty neat. The newer ones have gotten much more power hungry and expensive though. I don't own anything newer than a pi 3 though. -- Len Sorensen