May as well just buy a used laptop or desktop.
Used Mini PCs, brand name, like Lenovo tinys, are now my go to. Slightly larger, but orders of magnitude more capable, and often power sippy.
They still make use of desktop CPUs that can pull 120W when idling and up to 250W under heavy loads. So light on power? Maybe. But power sippy? Not against an M4 Mac, which can be as little as ⅙ as much under a similarly heavy load.
Or a mini pc. 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME ~$300.
Good luck when that market gets squeezed too.
Good thing there is so much old crap out there
Power consumption.
A Lenovo tiny use something like 4 w idle to 40w peak.
Electricity is green.
Honestly this is a sad point. The SBC trend was going ti remarkly small idle power comsumption.
For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.
But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.
This is for 16GB. 1G is $45, 2G is $77.
My 1G pi three is still working fine.
Okay that’s good to know. Honestly I always considered a Pi a single use, light weight device that just happens to run common ARM64. When they went for 8/16GB of RAM it felt like they were trying to turn them into mini general purpose computers.
And they do work like great general purpose computers. They have no moving parts, no fan and linux. So they are robust as fuck. Get the one that is coming in its own keyboard and you have everything you need.
I have two running several containers each, and another running a full Linux distro with desktop and browser for a family chrome board.
If they have a little RAM they do great.
Why not get something like a Beelink mini PC at this price? At least that gets you a Ryzen 5 cpu.
I wouldn’t pay the current top-end price for a Pi. A mini is a better value now, for sure.
Just sharing that the “general purpose” use isn’t a stretch or unreasonable.
How does the power use compare? Just curious, since my pi is almost always on.
I have an 8 node pi cluster that hosts a bunch of different things. They are pretty great.
No RPI is supposed to cost me a gill or a fin though.
In other words, 1G of RAM accounts for 32$?
Title is kinda misleading then. The comments prove it.
I bought a 16G for a project shortly after they came out on sale at Microcenter. It’s sitting in a closet right now, and it makes me feel bad that it’s not in use. I have Pi3Bs deployed everywhere, but no need for this monstrosity. Today.
It is now, just a shitty computer. It used to be a learning platform, but that price tag is not a learning price.
It became somewhat inevitable once companies started buying mass amounts of Pis for every purpose because they were so cost-efficient.
It used to be an education nonprofit, but it effectively became an industrial SBC supplier.
By now we’ve learned not to buy RPi again
Who’s the complete fucking idiot buying them at that price? Surely no one is that desperate.
The base model of Pi5 is $45 USD.
The 16 gig Pi 5 us $385 USD.
If you are using 16 gigs, you should probably using different hardware.
Definitely. A used mini PC is way faster than a Pi.
Seriously what the fuck. I thought these things were $25. I haven’t followed tech since last the last time I built a PC in 2022; I can’t believe the chip shortage has gotten this bad. (Fucking AI)
They basically still are, it’s just the advanced models with extra RAM. A Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM is a perfectly decent PC, and for the price, in the current market, is good. If you want a Pi to use the way you used to… That’s still in the region you were thinking. I bought a bunch of Pi 3s for a project recently, cost about £30 each.
I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!
And here I thought I was being stupid paying $1600 for a 4090 back then. Jesus Fucking Christ, $12K for a GPU!? That’s 1980s prices! Guess I won’t be upgrading for a long time… (edit: not that I need to anytime soon, lol. This card is a beast)
To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.
An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)
I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.
Man I remember getting pissed I couldnt get a Pi4 for less than $50, paid $30 for my Pi3
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.
Probably due to the shit AI. Seriously, AI is ruining society.
YA THINK??
Sorry… sorry. We’re all a little edgy over this.
AI sure does accelerate the shitty downward spiral of the last 20 years of new tech simply being more bloated crap.
I hope it (society/tech) will correct itself in response and return to sane levels of memory and cpu usage.
AI is like the last third of the human centipede. No taste and always hungry for more shit to make more shit of.
Because most AI don’t really care about ethics
Might as well just pickup a mini pc.
Depending on the use case, this is solid advice. I’d suggest checking on eBay for older, used machines that that are still pretty powerful compared to a Pi and are also quite cheap.
I wanted a mini with low power usage and fanless.
A mini PC and an Arduino is the ticket.
I’ve also had good luck with Orange PIs. Just checked pricing and they’ve gone up but not pushing anywhere near $400. I know Banana PIs and a few others are out there but I am less familiar with those.
Definitely going to check out Orange (and Banana) Pis. Thanks!
Can I run a mini-pc via PoE?
PoE can go up to 70W according to wikipedia. A few years ago, a cheap NUC would draw ~50W with heavy loads. And they would have probably been more capable than a Pi5, GPIO excluded (and you can add this to anything with USB. You might even be able to do something with a low-speed M2 port.)
Sure, just need a PoE adapter for it.
PoE splitters exist
Mini pc costs a grand+
Nah, just a used one off eBay. Just now, I saw some i7 8700s w/32GB for <100$.
It will use more power, but it’s going to be a lot faster for most tasks.
Wanted to suggest solar but added cost won’t make sense without multi use
I picked up a mini PC in July for 500 that I think goes for 600 today, 16GB ddr4 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.
I bought this one to run my Home Assistant. $329 Canadian.
That has 8GB RAM. The only reason the Pi in the headline is so expensive is the 16GB RAM. As others mentioned, the 1GB or 2GB options are a fraction of the cost.
It also comes with windows. If pick it over a pi every single time.
The 8GB Pi5 is still around $250 though and will be much less capable than that mini PC.
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 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.
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’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.
Agreed, at this point, they’re capitalising as much as they can off of their reputation.
How big of a difference is the power draw?
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 …
it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.
true
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.
The only reason I’ve ever used Raspberry Pis is because they’re cheap as hell. I think $45 is the most I’ve ever paid for one. Fuck this.
Yeah, I bought the original Pi 1 (B, o think?) and every version up to a 4, and one zero. I now use them for things like driving my 3d printer, pi hole etc.
I gifted my son a Pi5, and soon regretted it, as I later found out that the fuckers were not using standard USB C power, but a proprietary version of USB C. Fuck their enshitified souls.
Yup. They gave up on their mission to provide high quality chips at low prices a while back. I still have a Pi4 in use. I have a couple of 3B and 0+. But they’re so slow, I’m only going to use them where I need a full computer instead of something like an ESP32. Needless to say, those are all sitting on the shelf because ESP32s are capable of running most of what I need.
Unfortunate how bad the last 7 or so years have been market wise for the raspberry pi project. It feels like every time the hardware on one end gets cheaper, some other tech fad squeezes another component price up.
I don’t understand the hate towards the makers of the Pi. Obviously they didn’t raise the price because they’re greedy.
Fuck Apple, but one thing you need to give them credit for is that over years they didn’t raise their prices once, they even lowered them for the iPhone at one point. And even they needed to raise the prices.
Blame the memory manufacturers for creating a fake shortage because they don’t want to ramp up their production capabilities because they like the high demand.
You want to bring Apple in this? Apple, with the devices that are three-four times as expensive as they should have to be, built with sub-par quality components, because of course, whilst going so far as to adding crypto keys to their hardware to ensure you can’t repair it?
Apple already sells overpriced devices and other manufacturers are doing the same, this time, in the name of inflation and memory shortages.
I’m not sure that Apple is a good example to use here. They just announced their new MacBook - starting at $3,000. Their new cell phone starts at $2,000.
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
What the fuck.
Manufacturing for AI has increased demand for material and lithography. The price has followed accordingly.
And as Sam Altman says, “your RAM is wasted and idle anyways, gotta feed my silicon god” (“you’ll own nothing and be a serf”).
Hardware hoarding by corporations who were allowed to accrue so much money they can afford to buy up hardware just to keep it out of the hands of their competitors.*
Oh, I know. I’m just flabbergasted that a pi costs nearly $400 bucks. Last one I bought was 29.99 and that felt expensive.
Nah the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been going down this route since covid, long before AI was being crammed into and consuming everything.
