Because kids get them, don't do anything useful or fun with them, and conclude that engineering is not for them. They also eat up often-tight discretionary budgets for educational tools.
> please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things
Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)
For example, if I want to create something to monitor and auto water my garden. I don't want to have a laptop sitting outside 24/7 or a line inside and require my desktop PC on 24/7.
So youre running an entire Linux environment to turn a relay/solenoid on and off?
Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.
On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?
“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.
