Comment by ahepp
17 days ago
I see the Raspberry Pi model B+ available right now on Adafruit for $30. It has a single core 700 MHz CPU and 512M RAM.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is available right now for $15 with a 1 GHz 64 bit quad core CPU and 512 MB RAM.
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?
Looking at https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux, I scrolled a few pages of commits and didn't even see one from outside the Raspberry Pi org. I'm picking through their merged PRs and it looks like maybe there are a couple, it's hard to tell.
But it looks to me like they just do a great job supporting their own product?
> 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.