Raspberry Pi computers are hard to get, expensive and slow, now at least one maybe two generations behind competitors in terms of speed.
Upton claims that these companies had to use Raspberry Pi…. sounds false to me - lots of other companies changed their designs to handle the shortage.
If anything, Upton should have backed kids and schools above all - they are the one who really needed hobby computing during Covid lockdowns. Upton's justifications don’t ring true.
Also the company has treated hobbyists, kids and schools like garbage.
I have a raspi running pretty much non-stop since 2011 and am still able to update its software 12 years after purchase. All "somethings elses" which I bought had 3-4 years of software support and then their usability diminished drastically.
Why would the boards of this class need ongoing software support? Aren't you supposed to be able to run normal Linux on them, with few device-specific drivers (which don't need to change, since the hardware doesn't)?
Some had very customized kernels which stopped being released. Since getting all the custom drivers to work was too much pita for these devices' vendors, why would I pay them and invest my time in getting their hardware to work?
That these devices are useful for hobbyists, doesn't automatically mean that people want to periodically spend hours to have them working with up-to-date software.
Part of the problem here is that SoC drivers are hacked on top of the kernel (and are not merged in-tree). So SoC vendors have this pile of legacy and hacked-on code they need to cherry-pick every time the Kernel changes an interface they used (which is a lot) [0]. The code is also, let's be honest here, low quality and full of workarounds for implementation details (some radio-modem talking over I2C to transmit voice to the SoC???) so there's no way it would get merged into the kernel.
Of course, that costs and fortune and hampers the sales of newer chipsets so it’s not in the SoC vendor’s interest to do so.
> Of course, that costs and fortune and hampers the sales of newer chipsets so it’s not in the SoC vendor’s interest to do so.
On the other hand, it would be in a lot of vendors' cost-saving interests to massively lobby for a (much more) stable in-kernel driver interface in the Linux kernel so that the vendors only rarely have to change their Linux drivers when a new kernel version gets released.
> sounds false to me - lots of other companies changed their designs to handle the shortage.
Sure, if;
- You don't run any other OS then Linux. For example Raspberry PI has pretty decent FreeBSD support. Other boards often don't support FreeBSD or not all hardware on the board has drivers.
- You don't have a custom case which relies on the design of the PI.
- You don't already have dozens or hundreds of PI's in the field and are not that enthusiastic to add a new board to the mix.
- You will probably also have to add a new board to the mix every 3 or 4 years or so since these other boards often have a lot shorter lifecycle.
BananaPi, OrangePi, Odroid, NanoPi, Radxa would be some of the more well-known names. If you just need "something that runs Linux" pretty much everything qualifies, if you have more specific needs it comes down to comparing in detail... On the other hand, you can also find things serving needs that Pis don't cover so well (e.g. multiple Ethernet interfaces, SATA, ...)
> OP links the Banana Pi M5, VIM1s, Odroid C4, Rock 3A, and the Orange Pi 5 4GB as potential alternatives, but the hardware is not the problem, it's the software support and the community. I'm curious if you've found any SBCs out there that might be viable alternatives to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.
From the linked Ask HN.
Hardware is irrelevant if the software isn't comparable. I'd like to be proven wrong but if nothing has changed in the last years there are no real alternatives to the Pi.
If by "software support" you mean "people provide ready-made SD card images with project X already installed", then yes, no alternative to the Pi.
If you mean "gives me a standard linux distro I can install software on that can talk to the network and maybe show a UI on a screen", pretty much anything works (and a lot of things people do with Pis are just that - running things like network-wide adblockers, 3D printer servers, small python scripts for whatever).
If it's somewhere in between, it again depends. E.g. if I wanted a MIPI camera, I'd probably track down a RPi and use that unless I could find someone documenting a precise setup on something else.
If step 1 is to spend 30 hours researching the state of linux for each of the alternatives that makes them dead on arrival and a complete waste of time and money in my mind.
Probably much quicker for most people, and then they end up having to debug it to death. And yes, that includes pretty much any alternative mentioned here.
Is some of these a product that runs on mainline Linux? I feel like a device that only runs a kernel with weird vendor patches is going to be stuck on that kernel, which might be a problem for software support going forward. And will certainly be a problem from security point of view.
Pine64 aims to get their boards (and phones) working on mainline Linux. And their work applies to other boards using the same SoC, so for example the Rockchip RK3399 used in the Pinephone Pro and the Orange Pi 4 both run mainline.
I still find that if I want a board that “just works” a Raspberry Pi is an easier option. Whilst the manual for the Broadcom SoC is incomplete the documentation and software support for other SoCs is even more variable.
I really hope the likes of the VisionFive SBC see decent adoption. Their reference manual seems good - but I haven’t really played around with the board all that much.
That’s a new one for me. I would find it a lot less condescending to be told a straight “this made us the most money” reasoning. Anything else is obviously BS or incompetence.
They're available on Amazon, 2GB board is currently $35. Same footprint as the Pi, fits most of the same cases, hats, etc. Decent support forums and community, and the images aren't too esoteric.
> Some members of the community have been vocal in their disappointment with stock levels, some even stating that they are switching away from the Raspberry Pi. Upton believes that the anger is completely understandable and that it was the "single hardest decision I've ever had to make in my business career[.]" Upton continues "It's extremely hard to decide when you are a hobbyist, as I am, and you built this thing (Raspberry Pi) for hobbyists and education, to prioritize a different market (industrial customers).
> Upton then explains that OEM customers are mainly 3,000 boards per year, with between one to ten employees who build some specific product using the Raspberry Pi and cannot use an alternative SBC. If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". Upton then explains "So the real question, when people are saying, 'Should you do this prioritization call?' is 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?'. It didn't feel like the moral thing to do."
> Upton then explains that it felt like Raspberry Pi were doing the right thing, or hoped that community members would give them the benefit of the doubt. But Upton is aware that some members will be permanently disgruntled. Upton clarifies the misconceptions that Raspberry Pi are not making boards, they are, they are just not making enough. The second misconception being that Raspberry Pi are favoring large customers (Upton uses IBM as an example) over the communtiy, when in reality it is the smaller OEM customers who are the median customer base. Upton concludes by saying that they are looking forward to now making that judgment call anymore.
Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous.
> Okay, yeah, they just permanently lost me. The idea that they had to make this decision to save the jobs of all those people is ridiculous.
A potential mitigation that the Raspberry Pi Foundation could have done: commercial users can get prioritized RPi boards, but they have to pay an insane mark-up for this priotization (say 200 € instead of 50 € for a board).
This way, corporations for which otherwise the production chains would stand still (i.e. much larger financial losses) can get a solution, but a solution that is not cheap.
This solution should appease many hobbyists, since this way they don't feel that commercial users "buy away the RPis, which were originally developed for hobbyists and schools", but rather that such commercial users rather subsidize the RPis for the hobbysist and schools via the "priotization mark-ups".
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I think the biggest thing is this changes the conversation at a company level about which boards to buy. Generally, companies have a lot more resources to put towards supporting more niche commercial boards, like generating their own BSPs and Linux builds. They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies.
> They went with Pis because they are a) cheap and b) easier. If they are a) more expensive and b) easier, that would change the calculation potentially for a lot of companies.
I do believe there exist further points that make the Raspberry Pi boards attractive to companies (in opposite to SBC offers by many other companies):
c) There exist a lot of people (potential empoloyees) who have already worked with a RPi (even if for private projects) and thus know RPi's insides rather well.
d) The RPi boards (even very old ones) are supported by the manufacturer for a very long time with GNU/Linux support that (mostly) "simply works".
e) The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British company (in opposite to boards by Chinese producers)
Potentially:
f) The esteemed Raspberry Pi brand might also give some martketing prestige to an offering of a company that uses a RPi board as a central part ("Our product uses a Raspberry Pi").
I don't even understand why its an either-or. Can't they treat the hobbyist market as another pseudo-commercial user, assigning blocks of boards to sell to hobbyist distributors?
Isn't that what they are doing? Pis do keep popping up briefly at various distributors, just not in the numbers needed to keep them in stock consistently.
Again? Still. Getting parts has been nasty the past few years. (I think my favorite was the supplier that basically said "well, I can prioritize your order if you buy 10k units. Then I can get 500 to you in 6 months. Of course you need to pay for all 10k now. No, I can't tell you when we'll be able to deliver the entire 10k, might be a few years")
I don't think they've talked about what their specific constraint is, but given their SoC supply afaik is still entirely dependent on Broadcom I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom basically said "ok, you can have X units this quarter" and that's that. Not like RPi can easily replace Broadcom and not like Broadcom doesn't have demand from other potentially more important customers to meet.
The top 2 uses of hobby Raspberry Pis is to sit in a drawer, or play tv shows you downloaded off the internet, that's the easiest market to switch to an alternative.
> If that's true, I wonder why the market hasn't corrected. With the prices Pis have had lately, I would expect them to go from drawers to ebay quickly.
My personal explanations (I do believe there is a grain of truth in each of them, but you have to take them all together to get an explanation):
- A lot of the RPi boards that lie around in the drawers are older versions in which many buyers are less interested.
- Many buyers are hesitant to buy used RPis because something might be broken with them; this risk (and attempting to get a refund) is not worth the trouble.
- In countries where there are complicated taxation laws and strong(er) customer protection laws, many hobbyists do not consider it to be worth the (felt) potential legal trouble to put their RPis on eBay.
Mind sharing your statistics on hobby RasPi usage? It would be interesting to see just how many just sit in a drawer. If it's a ridiculous number you might change my opinion on this! :)
I set out to save the world, but then a corporation that was built on my product, because it was much cheaper for them than the alternative, said they would make less profit if they didnt get all of my product.
Morally I had to support the corporation at that point.
There's really not much point to Raspberry Pi's anymore, in my opinion. Their performance is so bad that they are terrible for general purpose computing. For embedded use cases, they are power hungry and lack features.
Its point is that its it costs less than $20 to have a working linux machine with GPIO. Not only that, it has all the documentation to allow most people to get from 0-flashing lights.
It was and is an educational platform.
the same with the rp-2040. Its a cheap, lowish power device that easy to program, has great documentation and is versatile.
If you're trying to run docker on it in production, then you have the wrong platform.
I personally still use them for 3D printers, and Raspberry Pis still provide good performance for the price if you can get them at MSRP. At that 40$ price range the main alternative is going to be an Allwinner H616 board like the BTT Pi or the Orange Pi Zero 2. I have actually run into a performance issue on one of my 3D printers that necessitated swapping a Pi 3 for a Pi 4, so performance did matter, and I'm unsure if a H616 would keep up.
I do have a few boards that are faster than a Pi 4, such as the Radxa Rock5 with the Rockchip RK3588, but they cost way more than a Raspberry Pi (once again if you can find at MSRP).
This is not the point of the raspberry pi. It is to provide a very cheap computer for developing countries so that they can access online ressources and education. What alternative do you see?
> The object of the charity is to further the advancement of education of adults and children, particularly in the field of Computers, Computer Science and related subjects
That is the purpose of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the registered charity in the UK.
I'm not sure how that fits with having so many non-educational customers.
I still can't make sense of his decision to favour SME customers. Someone who needs 3000 units a year is more likely to have the resources to redesign around a different SBC, than someone who orders a couple RPis a year.
Someone who orders only a couple a year is probably not loosing a lot of money from not being able to or having a harder time getting them. Even if it's commercial, 5/y is probably more in the realm of a few individually customized setups.
Whereas if you have a complete product designed around an SBC, respinning that is expensive, and a few hundred to a few thousand units is an ugly point where that leads to really high per-unit costs.
Whereas if you make millions of a thing, the overall development cost is similar, but spreads over many more units. (EDIT: you also probably aren't using an SBC, for similar-ish reasons: a customized board is saving you money per-unit, and millions is enough to amortize the up-front cost of that and still come out ahead)
So the economic perspective IMHO makes a lot of sense.
Pretty much. Much larger products are also more likely to not use an SBC in the first place, so naturally the majority of the products needing Pis urgently are in that smaller range.
Of course you also have large companies making low-volume products using Pis, where I guess one could argue more that those companies should be able to take the hit of temporarily not being able to make as many as they'd like. But for smaller companies without large buffers or other business, its a big problem.
I'd be curious to what degree they've looked into the exact cases when deciding who to support.
People get into incredible mental contorsions to justify helping one customer who should really be able to find alternatives, over helping 1000+ customers who cannot.
Maybe a cynical take, but if a customer redesigns a product around a competing SBC due to Pi supply issues, that customer is likely lost forever - for rational and emotional reasons. So there's maybe some protection of the Pi reputation and business with SME customers thrown in there?
> but if a customer redesigns a product around a competing SBC due to Pi supply issues, that customer is likely lost forever - for rational and emotional reasons.
I'm inclined to say that that's true, and even that it might make sense in terms of money for the RPi folks to prioritize businesses for that reason, but it's worth remembering that it cuts both ways: Individuals also remember which vendor screwed them over.
However, I suspect that individuals are more likely to tolerate delays in hardware acquisition, and also more likely to stick with an RPi due to the ecosystem offering vastly greater levels of support and existing solutions.
(When I struggled to lay my hands on a Pi Zero a while back, I looked for other options, but found various negatives for the potential alternatives.)
> If these customers do not have access to Raspberry Pi, then they are likely to "go to the wall". 'Should I zero some of those customers or constrain them so heavily that they go out of business or take very serious damage?'
The general lack of anything Raspberry Pi is having knock-on effects as well. The lower-end mini-PCs (NUC, etc.) are completely gone at my MicroCenter. Only the mid/top-tier minis are still around.
Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine.
> Things seem to be looking up, though - they actually have Pi 400 kits in stock, something I haven't seen in seemingly ages. If you can cannibalize a 400 or use it as-is, that's a nice option, particularly with the heat sink. Unfortunately, it's kits only, not the bare machine.
Additionally, unfortunately there does not exist a version of the Raspberry Pi 400 with 8 GiB of RAM.
Upton claims that these companies had to use Raspberry Pi…. sounds false to me - lots of other companies changed their designs to handle the shortage.
If anything, Upton should have backed kids and schools above all - they are the one who really needed hobby computing during Covid lockdowns. Upton's justifications don’t ring true.
Also the company has treated hobbyists, kids and schools like garbage.
Buy something else.