Comment by throwup238

This is spot on. There is a market for small SBCs that spans from weapons to washing machines. When the RPi was introduced it threw a huge wrench into that market because it came in, with an operating system and storage, at under the price for the typical enclosure, much less the board itself of the existing systems. Look at PC104 systems for example.

The two pieces that have to be in place, as 'threshold' requirements are

1) The SBC exists and is available from a manufacturer

2) The same manufacturer provides an OS for that board and its associated board support package (BSP) which is drivers for all the I/O and system support functions.

The industry is full of people who went out of business because they chose Vendor A's SBC and Vendor B's OS, only to fail to deliver when it didn't work with Vendor A and Vendor B point at the other saying it was their problem. So people just don't do that any more.

What most vendors in the SBC space, prior to the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, didn't have was 20 to 30 thousand programmers writing random bits of code. What that meant was the Pi's feature set exploded rapidly, what's more there were lots of free tutorials on programming it.

In the SBC space before Pi that "Programmer Training" was one of the ways the vendor made better margins at $500/hr for a class of "up to 15 students" at our facilities.

So before, higher priced SBC + BSP, and you had to send your programmers on a road trip to the vendors facility to get the hands on training, and then you had to pay every time you made a service request.

After, cheap SBC + BSP!, a bunch of different programming videos on the web for free! Program doesn't work? Just ask the community of enthusiasts what they think!

We are not surprised a whole lot of the smaller SBC vendors closed down after that.

> I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.

Before RPi became really popular and the 4 came out, I used BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, Aria G25, Gumstix, Cubieboard, i.MX devkits, and spun custom boards using Marvell, TI, Freescale (now NXP), and Qualcomm CPUs - I don't remember any of them having as good a BSP or being as easy to develop with as the RPi was five years ago. Maybe my memory is (very) faulty but the experience was leagues worse. PTSD-inducing level of worse. I wasted weeks or months on every major project shaving silicon yaks that should have been handled by the vendor (and is now handled by the RPi community).

The modern i.MX toolchain may now be comparable many years later but I've long since given up on everything else since CM4 came out in 2020.

My understanding is that they lost the sweetheart deal after they pivoted to supporting commercial, right in time for the pandemic supply crunch.

> I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price.

And you still can! The big innovation from Raspberry Pi was making it all feel very accessible through the documentation, community, and various utilities to configure things via menus instead of by editing files.

The Raspberry Pi was rarely the best board, but it was the easiest to recommend to beginners because you could point them to volumes of documentation and community threads.

This business history would add valuable context to RPi wiki, or a public reference on the history of SBCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

While I agree... it has been much better supported than the alternatives. I've tried several other SBCs and they have all had issues that I didn't experience with the RPi. Not that RPi hasn't had issues of its' own. Namely in power requirements, the USB-C in physical but not electronic sense for power, to overloading most USB power supplies in practical use in Pi 4B models.

I switched to the cheaper Intel mini pcs when RPi supplies were short, and scalping made it much more expensive. A whole PC with more ram, case, psu and faster storage that was faster for under $200 vs $150+ for an 8GB RPi 4 board only was a no brainer.

> essentially getting these chips for free

> by getting the most expensive component for free

I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success. To explain why let's examine something else you're wrong about:

> You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.

Prior to the Pi you could get one board with good Linux support and a not terrible price from a vendor who provided support because they thought it was a good vector for selling chips. That was the BeagleBoard, from TI. I mean, the BB barely checked all those boxes: the support wasn't very good, it was kind of nonexistent compared to the support community the Raspberry Pi people created. But they sure didn't have to worry about the cost of the CPU.

So back to the original point: getting the CPU "for free" (since we're apparently just saying "free" now when we mean "at cost") wasn't a decisive advantage for the Raspberry Pi people, since the TI people had the same advantage. TI had a few other advantages as well, like a first mover advantage, their own assembly lines, and relationships with everyone who sells electronics components.

TI's support was crap when compared to something like RPi which deliberately targeted newbies, and as far as I remember they didn't have a few amazing people in their community dedicated to making a whole new spin of Debian and supporting it like RPi did. And, you know, PR matters. All that stuff is what made the difference.

> anticompetitive

I guess we're just throwing words around without caring what they mean today for some reason.

When a product is gated behind "contact us for pricing" the chances of me, a hobbist, using it are close to zero.

Maybe there was a market of cheap and friendly to use sbc. But calling it hobbyst is an stretch.

Yes, as the article discusses, there were also the options of just using a mini-tower or SFF desktop, or a NUC/booksize PC, and often these options were comparable or less in price.

For example, I owned an ECS Liva 2/32 that I got for $100 AR and a pair of ECS Liva X 2/32 that I got for $125 each AR. These used standard N2807 and N2808 Bay Trail-D processors (Silvermont), meaning they are OoO, run standard x86 binaries and distributions, come with storage onboard (which was far more reliable than the early days of fullsize SD cards), a proper adapter, a case, and USB 3.0, for essentially the same price you paid for a Raspberry Pi 1B once you factored in all the little extras.

Obviously if you want to do GPIO and stuff, the RPi is a better option, but that also competes with micros, as mentioned. And a lot of people ended up using it for some variety of non-GPIO IOT thing attaching some USB device to wifi/ethernet, or as a NAS, etc, and the Pi was terrible at these. It had massive reliability problems (unthinkable today) and I went from incredibly excited to bouncing off it hard and learning a lesson about the right tool for the job, and I think I wasn't alone.

Part of the problem was the decision to use USB 2.0 as a system bus. Everything including network and disk all hung off a single half-duplex USB 2.0 high-speed bus. And the Rpi firmware had a bug in the USB stack which dropped frames under load, so actually this was unreliable and could lead to corruption all on its own. It took over 2 years after launch for the foundation to fix this fundamental bug in the literal system bus of their hardware (and thanks to broadcom's closed documentation/blobs, they were the only ones who could see the info to fix it).

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19

On top of that, people forget about the non-micro-SD card slot. The fullsize slot just let the card cantilever out into space... but the thermoplastic used to make SD cards actually will soften enough from the heat of the rpi over time to warp away from the contacts and lose connection. Even just stepping up to eMMC (not the most reliable) was a massive step upwards because of how bad the Pi was at not melting its SD cards.

And the power adapter situation has always been dire - most USB chargers were utterly unable to provide consistent enough power to avoid brownouts and corruption, and (while you could PXE boot) the hardware was not even capable of PXE booting without at least a helper SD card to load from. Today, it's dire once again, with the Pi 5 drawing 5A @ 5V from the adapter, which essentially no adapter on the market is capable of delivering.

The 2B and later models (especially 4B) are enormously faster, the move to OoO cores instead of literal a single-core A57 or whatever improved performance a ton. The change to USB 3.0 (5gbps full-duplex vs 480mbps half-duplex) and getting the USB frame drop bug fixed helped a ton (the pi couldn't even serve a usb hard drive at full speed). And the 4B moved to armv8 which has a drastically clearer standard for binaries than the armv7 situation, which was an utter mess at the start (softfp binaries were a thing for a bit with the early 1B releases iirc!). Admittedly Pi was better than any other arm device but the Liva just ran debian or ubuntu.

I actually think it was an utter failure as a product. I cannot imagine having to maintain a whole computer lab of these things melting (softening+warping) the SD cards, can't even PXE boot unassisted, can't get good adapters? Let alone the situation with firmware problems/driver quality and needing (at the time) weird binaries with a non-standardized bootloader etc. Why would you buy that instead of the Liva X for the same finished price?

The pivot to "these are for makers!" was a pivot, and then they pivoted again into commercial. Like good for them but it's always been a messy product with an uncertain target market.

It was always borne largely on the backs of enthusiasts shoving it into various home-server and IOT usage, most of which didn't actually need a GPIO. And the GPIO thing was always better served by the ESP8266 in most situations, and that ecosystem really matured almost in parallel with the Rpi. So sure, while the Pi got more suitable for actual GPIO hobbyism over time, so did everything else too. I regard the whole thing as fundamentally having been overhyped and a waste of time by people who (in most circumstances) really should just have bought a booksize or an off-lease OEM USFF desktop.

That was me. Got an old Core2Duo desktop for $10 at a surplus sale, that became the fileserver I was trying to build, which instantly ended the reliability struggle I'd been having (rpi lasted an average of 1-2 months MTBF in my homeserver usage) then I got a couple booksize and nettops and ended up with NUCs etc which are just a far better fit for what I'm trying to do.

To each their own, but again, I think really very few people are interested in them for the GPIO stuff, it's the "$35 for a little computer" thing that draws people in, but that's an impedence mismatch to expectations, that's not why you should buy a rpi/if that's your use-case then there are better options.

There are complete passively cooled n3350 based systems on Ali express with 64gb storage and 6gb ram in a case with power supply ready to go for $65 with free shipping. That works out cheaper than the cheapest pi after buying case, storage and power for the pi. You can buy usb gpio breakouts for <$10 too. Lower power than the pi 4 too due to the huge process node advantage (despite the x86 disadvantages). 28nm vs 14nm for the pi 4 vs the n3350.

The pi is fun but honestly for pi hole or similar you might as well buy the all in one x86. For media streaming definitely buy the all in one x86. For gpio stuff ok the pi is reasonable but even then if you want to make a product rather than a home automation once off you’d go a different route completely.

Inflation adjusted the 1B (with 512MB, which was the only available variant) was slightly more expensive than the 5 with 2GB at their respective release. The price "increase" is that 4 and 8GB models are available at all and most people buy them, presumably because people actually don't care about the purchase price so much. But you still get the cheapest variant, if you really want to. Also, there are different variants of the Zero, all of which are cheaper than the 1A at release.

The power brick got more expensive due to the increased power use. Also if you want to make use of the full power, you need a cooler. But you can also do without cooler, because it just gracefully slows down when overheated.

I think the Pi drove the price of lower end computers down so far that people completely lost their sense of perspective.

> Oops, I hadn't realized the 4B with 1 GB was discontinued.

Is it? I can buy one for $35 at my local Microcenter, and I can see that Adafruit is selling them for $35 as well. [0] It's still listed as a $35 part on the official Raspberry Pi product page. [1]

[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4295

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

Those low price ones are never available. The cheapest 4b I see right now is $60. Which isn't bad, but not $35.

> So it seems to me that you can get a Raspberry Pi SBC today, that has higher or equal specs in every regard, for a lower cost than the original. Am I missing something?

It’s just supporting whoever needs a RPi 1st generation. It’s the same reason some older models of things cost the same or more, it’s basically fishing for the “we need the exact same hardware” customer.

The Pi Zero models are also kind of priced to move to make a statement of “look how much power we can stuff in a $5 board”; IIRC they were at first sold at a small loss to hit that $5 price point.

I think the main point is that you know the company/product support isn't just going to disappear into the sunset in 2 years and you're stuck with an increasingly outdated hacked together kernel thrown over a wall

Given that Raspberry Pi hasn’t actually been well supported by mainline Linux and that the Raspberry Pi foundation hasn’t put a lot of effort into upstreaming things, I don’t think it’s actually a big deal. People don’t care where their kernel comes from as long as it works.

I am surprised by all of the comments here that assume Raspberry Pi has great upstream support. It’s amazing that people just assumed their boards were working great with upstream kernels. Raspberry Pi has a history of doing nonstandard things that serve their community but are actually a little bit quirky when it comes to normal embedded Linux.

And for professionals.

except that RPi does not support mainline Linux...