this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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It's a tough call, because while their decision to go IPO sucks, they're one of the few SBCs with consistent kernel support.
I've heard about a lot of headaches people have with other SBCs due to lack of support.
As much as the Pi Foundation sucks noodles, the levels of software support for the Pi is currently unequaled.
Anyway, here's hoping it gets equaled, and fast.
What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have "lost its way".
I'd argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.
Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.
But nowadays pis are in the no man's land between. They're priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.
I'm not sure, how that's supposed to be sustainable.
Industrial applications... This is now their market, not tinkerers.
They are too slow and unreliable for the industrial market though. If you have money you can just buy X86.
Industrial is not all high tech or efficiency driven.
It's about cost and availability. They probably buy in bulk, have some Linux image with the exact setup they need. Then they just replace them if they break with little to no downtime.
For smaller bulk-use applications there's microchips like ESP or Teensy. For larger applications there's X86.
For a cost effective pi alternative there's Rockchip stuff.
There are tons of them in the industrial market. The entire shortage of them was from prioritizing the industrial market.
The entire shortage was because of Covid19
And then putting the shortfall into the industrial market, which is an important fact when countering the idea that Pi's aren't used in the industrial market.