I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.
I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
If you click through to crowd supply it’s only $8, which is less ridiculous.
But you lose the ability to have them toss a cable or two into the box at no real extra shipping cost to them, and I highly doubt their costs aren’t lower through their website.
Wasn’t actually pulling the trigger today either way, but it’s an odd setup.
I don’t expect it either, which is why these things don’t make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi’s have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they’re just too expensive now.
Yep. The initial idea was to have a cheap SBC, that you could give to an entire classroom without being worried too much if some of them break. 35€ are not exactly cheap, but doable. 80-90€ is simply not viable for that purpose anymore.
At the same time, for more serious projects, it’s lacking too many features like sata, pcie, etc., etc.
I feel like RPi is coasting on momentum, without a clear direction.
I’d rather have x86 tbh. Thanks for letting me know these exist.
A refurbished thin client from eBay. Or a refubed sff/usff.
They are pretty much the same price these days, and come with a case/PSU.
If you don’t need the GPIO and special connectors that a raspberry pi has, sff/usff is going to be cheaper, has upgradeable ram&sata and some have pcie3.0 slot.
Running pihole (let’s be honest, a huge reason people buy a pi)? Get a usff/sff, slap an SSD (probably the cost of a raspberry pi case/PSU/SD-card) in there and an intel i340-t4 4port NIC (this is extra. Can just use the onboard NIC), and install proxmox. Then run pihole in a VM. And now you have spare capacity to run a whole bunch of other fun things, with the safety net of snapshots and backups so if you mess up a config you can just roll another VM.
I was in the market for something low budget with two nics for a local firewall. Since this gave me a nice discount on top, I ordered a zimaboard now as it’s pretty much exactly what I need. Thanks for the tip
Biggest benefit of those things is that they come with SATA ports so you can use them to build a <$100 2-bay NAS which is about half the price of popular competitors but with way more power.
Damn. Looked decent until I got to $30 on shipping.
They’ll probably be available on Amazon eventually
If you click through to crowd supply it’s only $8, which is less ridiculous.
But you lose the ability to have them toss a cable or two into the box at no real extra shipping cost to them, and I highly doubt their costs aren’t lower through their website.
Wasn’t actually pulling the trigger today either way, but it’s an odd setup.
Oh cool! I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.