Comment by II2II
19 days ago
I suspect a lot of the current disdain is a product of function creep. While the original Raspberry Pi was used as a desktop and server, people understood its limitations. Now that many of the limitations have diminished, to the point where you can expect reasonable performance as a desktop and use it as something more than a simple web server, people are justifiably comparing it to alternatives (which have come down in price over the same period of time).
Of course, the Pi is also facing competition from higher end microcontroller based solutions. People seem to forget that there was a time when hobbyists bought the Pi for "Internet of Things" like projects, both due to its cost and size. Then came the ESP8266 and ESP32 and development boards that packaged both a microcontroller and network interface.
This, but also that they gave a huge middle finger to the hobbyist community during the component crisis by giving preference to integrators.
Most makers I know have pivoted to ESP32 during this time as it was good enough and actually available. Probably would have happened sooner or later though.
The ESP32 has nothing to do with a Raspberry Pi. It's only good that people learnt to use the better tool (in terms of price and power consumption) once better tools like MicroPython or NodeMCU came around.
I don't agree.
When the first raspberry was introduced, it was really really hard to interface an electronics project with the internet. Arduinos were really dumb at the time. That's why the raspberry was so ideal. But most electronics projects didn't really need a whole linux distro running on it. It was just that there was no other option.
The ESPs introduced a totally new class that can cover most of the usecases of electronics projects that the raspberry originally aimed at. They support wifi, bluetooth, pretty serious processing, enough for most connected projects. They totally ate the raspberry's lunch in the embedded market. Of course the RP2040 aims for this too but IMO it's kinda too little too late, the ESP32 is already so well established and has the biggest community.
At the other end of course the PC pricing came down and the intel N100's and the like eat its lunchon the other side.
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If you have a led to light up over the internet the Pi was the simplest, cheapest and fastest to develop for. Now the ESP is simple enough and so cheap the RPi doesn’t make sense for the use case, but it took a long while to get here.