The Raspberry Pi is a platform optimized for and bundled with its community. The Raspberry Foundation can produce/license any conceivable number of these devices at the same price point. The difference of for example $35 vs $70 doesn't matter very much for individual buyers. It does matter when dealing with educational budgets and a desire for predictable spending. Even when a school/hobbyist course requires students to buy their own devices, even $5 differences can be a big deal.
The fixed price, high bulk, cooperation with education initiatives and governments, all translates to a relatively homogeneous, unfragmented "fleet" of devices, which just isn't the norm in small computers.
Beagle Bone, the Odroid series, and several other products are technically superior in most ways. But they don't have a comparable community size, and aren't focused on the educational sector as much. In some ways, these models attach to the Raspberry Pi community.
Actually the point of the Raspberry Pi IS the price because most of the OSS you can install and use in your Raspberry Pi can be installed and used in any regular PC that students may have at home, but can we assume all the students have a computer at home?
My partner works in education and I can tell you that lots of students don't have access to a computer at home. Well, Raspberry Pi price changes everything!
That's because RaspberryPis are no longer cheap throw away computers meant for education or hobbyists, they're developer kits for manufacturers that need a CPU running a well supported mainline Linux in their products.
The only reason they don't cost $500 or more is because the foundation needs the hobbyist market to write and support the open source BSP, without which the RPi would be just another poorly supported also-ran in an already crowded market. With how well supported mainline Linux is on the Pi, EEs would be willing to pay a lot more.
It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product.
From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.
I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.
And there is a much more powerful Raspberry Pi (model 3) available at the original price point of the Raspberry Pi. Or others like the zero that are even cheaper, and still more capable in some ways.
I'm not sure having a new one available that is quite a bit more powerful and costs $25 more is hurting those kids.
That doesn't change anything. The RPi is all about the price point. Yes, you can get other configurations, but the whole point of the Foundation is that $35 (or cheaper) machine - an affordable computer, built to a specific price point, with the aim of putting a "tinkering" computer into the hands of as many kids (and interested adults) as possible. It's nice that people are buying the things for various more mundane purposes, as that sort of subsidizes the main purpose... but the main purpose is still to provide an educational machine at an affordable price, and the $35 price point is a big part of that.
It's really doubtful that more than a tiny fraction of RPi sales have gone to kids. Be honest here, whatever the RPi Foundation's marketing, the overwhelming majority have gone to hobbyists.
The RPi is uniquely unsuited to an educational environment anyway. The SD cards are unreliable, especially in combination with the RPi's poor power filtering and the cheapo phone adapters it's usually paired with. Anyone who has used a RPi has had to deal with filesystem corruption and SD card failures, intermittent USB bus brownouts, etc, and I can only imagine the nightmare of having to maintain a lab with 50 of the things. You can't PXE boot them (let alone remote-manage them) because they have no BIOS, just a blob on a physical card that needs to be swapped out.
The Pi should have had eMMC day one, and shipped with a proper power adapter and better power filtering. But much like their choice of Broadcom SoCs - they made a political decision that they were going to market primarily around the $35 price point, and so they cheaped out on $5-10 worth of hardware and ended up with a device that was entirely unsuitable for their stated purpose.
And the terrible thing is - the PC is not the sole component in the system anyway. The Pi still needs a case, a a monitor, keyboard, switches, etc, and if you are trying to stand up a lab for the first time it's not like you have 50 monitors or keyboards laying around for free, you need to buy those. So you are looking at more like $150 per system anyway, and the $10 you save on cheaping out on the hardware becomes a meaningless fraction of the total cost. Just buy the right hardware the first time. An ECS Liva is only like $75 anyway, it comes with a case, onboard eMMC, AC adapter, and wifi, you've made up the difference in cost in accessories included in the box.
There were many other terrible design decisions as well - such as the choice of USB as a system bus, which is again entirely unsuitable, especially when you are running on a low-power processor where running the USB bus full-tilt eats a significant fraction of your CPU cycles. It's like that shitty Mac Performa x200 road-apple design with the split half-width left-hand/right-hand busses which couldn't talk to each other, it eats up all your cycles by just using your disk or network. Even if the processor on other boards is no faster in synthetic benchmarks - they have a proper system architecture with SATA and often USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet that makes an enormous difference in real-world performance.
Furthermore - the Pi was plagued by driver problems with its USB stack for years. It would randomly drop USB frames when operated at USB 2.0 speeds, and it took upwards of 2 years after launch for the Pi foundation to get around to pushing a fix (again, because they chose a processor for which they could not release documentation, and they did not employ enough staff to actually fix their issues). How on earth are you supposed to do education on it when they can't even get their system bus to be stable?
You know what I would do if I was running an actual lab? ECS Liva Xs, or other cheapo x86 PCs running a standard stack. Or go down to your university surplus store and pick up as many generic Dell boxes as you need for $50 apiece, out the door, ready to work. The Pi is good for embedded hobbyist work (the i2c interface is very powerful), but it totally fails as a machine for teaching programming compared to Ye Olde White Box.
I tried to run a pair of RPis as my fileservers for about a year and a half, and I finally just gave up and sold them. They aren't good for the "mini Linux PC" application at all, compared to properly-designed hardware that you can buy for only a little bit more money (or sometimes even less money, especially when you work out the total system cost).
(note: Pi3s can finally PXE boot without a SD card, which is like the bare minimum requirement for running an educational PC lab without going insane)
The main benefit of the Raspberry Pi in my opinion is the support. The documentation for the device is spectacular, and the community support is extremely good. Now, I don't feel this warrants paying $170 for the device, but when they are available at MSRP, this is quite the deal.
As I said in a previous Raspberry Pi thread[0], the comparison is supposed to be with high / school school textbooks, not college ones. School textbooks are cheaper than those used at university.
Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1]
$25 (roughly £15 at current rates) is a good rough price for a school textbook in the UK. A quick Amazon search shows this.[2]
Bear in mind, too, that the product is aimed in part at developing countries, where school textbooks may be cheaper.
The true price of what? The latest Raspberry Pi 5 with 8gb RAM?
What about a Raspberry Pi 1b, a W2 or a Pico? These are all devices that are great for learning computing. Kids can learn on a cheap £20 kit plugged into a TV.
So what if it's used? So what if it's a few years old? The drive, the purpose of these educational projects is to get kids onto them. Doesn't have to be the latest, by any means.
Don't forget software costs. Raspberry Pi foundation is known for excellent software and Pico seems to be intended that way too.
And that's money well spent, I think. If I'm a hobbyist and am planning on using a grand total of three microcontroller boards, than paying $2 x 3 for "blue pill boards", and then spending hours and hours debugging some obscure problem... that doesn't look like all that great of a deal, compared to paying $5 x 3 and making some use of polished examples and a nice build system:
Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity sponsored by Broadcom, maker of the chip.
$5 is an arbitrary price, and in no way shape or form comparable with a business making a single board computer and having to buy components at market rate.
The original Raspberry Pi was $25 and ran Linux. All it needed was a random USB PSU to work. This made it suitable for a lot of random projects. Smart light switch? Get a Pi. Homebrew thermostat? Get a Pi. Want to show off a Beowulf cluster? Get a dozen Pis. The cost and size was less than a normal thermostat (or even a nicer light switch). The size and complexity was low.
Now, it's $80 for the 8GB version. It requires a lot more power, and increasingly, active cooling, and what-not. Once you toss that in, it's big, expensive, and clunky. It's usable as a desktop-replacement, but the flipside is that the cost, size, and weight is the same as getting a computer. You can find a much more capable SFF desktop from Dell Refurbished or eBay. It actually costs more than a basic Chromebook (running Linux), and the Chromebook brings a lot more.
Pi Zero is perhaps on the right track, at $15 (the non-wireless version is sold out everywhere), but unfortunately, requires a fistful dongles to make work, which makes it miss the mark.
The appeal is also largely reduced by how much the cost of computers and other devices has gone down. Why spend $80 computer on a Pi when a full-fledged Android tablet from Aliexpress, with case, screen, touch, and battery, sells for half of that?
(The answer, for now, is legacy hats and infrastructure, as well as open-source, but that won't last forever; at some point, an Aliexpress vendor will sell that $40 tablet with open-source infrastructure, documentation, and perhaps a few GPIO pins too).
It's often advertised as a 35 dollar computer, etc., however when I decided to get one all the recommended partners and distributers were easily selling it for 40-45 minimum, excluding tax and shipping costs.
My take is that nobody is doing better than Pi in terms of the community Pi targets, e.g. students, amateurs and greenhorns alongside professionals. There's a critical mass with Pi that attracts industry players to be on the platform with what counts for decent support in the embedded world, e.g. Microsoft and Canonical.
The fixed price, high bulk, cooperation with education initiatives and governments, all translates to a relatively homogeneous, unfragmented "fleet" of devices, which just isn't the norm in small computers.
Beagle Bone, the Odroid series, and several other products are technically superior in most ways. But they don't have a comparable community size, and aren't focused on the educational sector as much. In some ways, these models attach to the Raspberry Pi community.
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