Might as well just pickup a mini pc.
Mini pc costs a grand+
I picked up a mini PC in July for 500 that I think goes for 600 today, 16GB ram 1TB drive, 25 watt, integrated video card with 3GB, very quiet. It runs way more retro games than my pi3, also using it for a media PC and some light DAW & development work with no problems.
Makes me extra angry that I got one the year it first released as an xmas gift from my parents… then a week later when i went looking for it my wife threw it out because she assumed all the bags from the gifts were empty… I never got a new one and still bitter about that one.
F
jesus. I have only 4ram.
nextcloud, jellyfino, navidrome, qbitorrent and its getting tight…
Og launched at 35. Inflation be nuts
This one was never $35. The higher compute power and 16GB onboard RAM had the base price at $120 at launch.
This isn’t inflation, it’s billionaire-flation.
OG only had 1G. This one at 1G is only $45.
Probably due to the shit AI. Seriously, AI is ruining society.
YA THINK??
Sorry… sorry. We’re all a little edgy over this.
I bought a Dell Optiplex at Goodwill for $20 that could probably run circles around that thing.
And likely not that much more power usage
It is after my upgrades.
I’m sure a lot more capable as well though.
Yes. I upgraded the CPU to an i7-4790 and I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB. I also got some pcie sata cards and added a bunch of HDD’s. The HDD’s are mostly lower capacity ones I had laying around but it’s cool. I installed Cachy OS on it and even got Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen running on it. I don’t have room for a dedicated GPU so modern games are out of the question. It was a fun project.
Look for GPU enclosures, you can get them cheap used now.
Wtf who would pay that much for a fuckin raspberry poo
The entire point of raspberry pi is that they’re like $15 bucks for a bunch of cheap components. That’s why in every picture there’s no housing or anything. It’s just a $0.10 pcb and a few dollars here and there of components from the same mass produced factory that’s still producing the same usb ports and microcontrollers from old motherboards in 1999
Are you sure $385 isn’t for like two hundred of them? For like students?
With FEX and 16GB of ram you can probably play low power PC games without much issue now, it’s just a computer
But for the same money you can buy a real mini PC and not have to emulate them…
I don’t think I’d call FEX or proton emulation, but yeah
It seems really antithetical to the whole point of raspberry pi. Like a lowered/slammed truck that can’t carry anything, or a bicycle with 100 training wheels and a gas motor.
It’s like they’ve lost the plot.
It would be one thing if it was done by a user for fun, or otherwise was the exception to the rule. But having a $400 raspberry pi is ridiculous.
You’re not wrong but…
A whole x86 SoC for reading a dial and controlling some RGB LEDs and a dot matrix display is ridiculous. Microcontrollers are IFAIK still as cheap as ever.
I switched to ESP32 chips for my hobbies and then the damn Europeans imposed tariffs on AliExpress &co and now even those cost double now.
Seriously, these EU tariffs on imported goods piss me off so fucking much. I like some EU things (GDPR, etc), but then they also make decisions that are so fucking bad. We were already paying VAT. The new taxes basically kill hobbies for me. It is just a pro drop-shipping business BS by business majors tax.
I agree that the cost increase is a bad thing, but something had to be done in general. Huge masses of wrongly declared packets (to save on import taxes) were flooding the EU market, disrupting local business. To prevent what happened with the german solar panel industry, which was gutted by chinese cheap manufacturing and non-existing help from the government, there had to be measures taken.
I agree, but make it something reasonable like 20% of the order and not +3€ for every tiny 1€ electronic component in my order.
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I need money so maybe I should look into selling all of mind now.
I wanted to get one of these for a server…
Ended up getting an N100 Chinese mini PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, just ready to go… it consumes…3.6W - 4.1W on idle running Ubuntu Server. I’m 100% satisfied.
Still I had to pay like 260€ these mini PC were a lot cheaper before.
I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.
How big of a difference is the power draw?
Buddy. I am running a seven camera Frigate system with a Thinkpad X230t (2012). That is the ultimate thicc-pad with a chunky rotatable,foldable touchscreen, from 2012. Obsolete, but not on eBay, Google tpu USB dongle. Total system cost to me <$300 bucks. Oh, yeah I forgot to mention it runs my Home Assistant, Lyryion music server and Tailscale. I have a sneaky suspicion that thing is going to last for a couple more decades. It is Military grade hardware. Look it up. And if you walk into my kitchen. There’s a HA dashboard and control pane on it. It’s a touchscreen after all. You can even click the stylus/pen out of the side if your hands are greasy. There’s a recipes navigator/editor (Zim wiki) on the desktop. I don’t know. I personally think it is as stylish of a kitchen appliance as you can find. I guess it depends on your sensibilities.
I’m currently building a passively cooled laptop Ryzen server with 32gb DDR4 RAM for less money. It is, like, TEN TIMES more powerful, and draws maybe 3x of Pi power consumption in peak loads, and is just as quiet and out of the way. Oh, and 1tb SSD is included in price calculations.
Times make us get creative with the tools we have.
Pi also wins in size, if space really is limited. But yes you’re right, in many use cases an old normal computer makes more sense. Bit fewer e-trash also…
I have a stack of these and Lenovo tinys in a drawer ranging from 8 to 2 years old. Just no time or ideas what to do with them all
Are you me 😅 thinkcentre usff FTW!
I even use one as my daily driver …
This is for 16GB. 1G is $45, 2G is $77.
My 1G pi three is still working fine.
In other words, 1G of RAM accounts for 32$?
Okay that’s good to know. Honestly I always considered a Pi a single use, light weight device that just happens to run common ARM64. When they went for 8/16GB of RAM it felt like they were trying to turn them into mini general purpose computers.
And they do work like great general purpose computers. They have no moving parts, no fan and linux. So they are robust as fuck. Get the one that is coming in its own keyboard and you have everything you need.
Title is kinda misleading then. The comments prove it.
I thought the Pi 5 was too expensive when it came out. This is just ridiculous. For most uses, a used PC, phone or tablet would be a much better choice. The only Pi I would even consider using is the Zero 2W, but they’ve been out of stock all year.
Its not actually that crazy given this is for the 16gb model. Ram is fucked at the moment 🤷♂️
Well needing 16GB might be the crazy part then.
The real power of the Pi 5 is as is a testbed that can easily convert to the CM5.
For people using them as small computers they make no real sense though
I don’t get how they can justify this. I can get a proper mini PC with 16GB RAM and an 500GB NVME SSD for less than that.
The parts SBCs use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded applications.
use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded
I mean, yeah I’m aware that LPDDR SDRAM chips are in short supply as a lot of the capacity was shifted for other types of SDRAM, but is it enough to allow for an entire SSD to be included at the same price? Its not like flash prices haven’t also increased a ton.
I was also thinking that there are cooling systems (fans are expensive!), cases, etc. that add costs to mini PCs that mean they really shouldn’t compete with SBC in price.
Just wait for a few months for an existing stock of prebuilt PCs to run out, and you’ll see their price jump even higher.
Cheap Chinese Pi knockoffs like OrangePi are also becoming more expensive, it’s because the cost of the components increases. AI companies now buying all RAM and every RAM, even ancient DDR3.
I doubt AI companies are buying DDR3, it’s just second-order effects of new hardware being unobtainium.
I don’t know but this guy seems to understand it
Holy shit I spent like $75 on one of these with a case…
That’s kind of expensive, I bought mine for around 25-35€… (Only one with a case).
Now, my thinkcentre usff, they sometimes cost 40 to 80€…
300+? Madness.
