That’s pretty steep. I can get a Beelink with an N95, 8 GB of memory, and 256 GB of storage on Amazon, right now, for $127. Comes with intel quick sync, I can upgrade the RAM later if I want, and the SSD isn’t going to corrupt anytime I sneeze.
The Pi Pico and Pi Zero 2 W are still great but their high end Pis don’t make sense anymore. Form factor and/or that 6ish*** watt difference between the Beelink and Pi 5 have to be really important
<span style="color:#323232;">* based off pi 4 charger
</span><span style="color:#323232;">** based off Microcenter website
</span><span style="color:#323232;">*** quick google search of both devices’ power consumption under load
</span>
Then please, buy the Beelink thing so I can get a Pi 5 for projects. I already have chargers, plenty of SD cards, a 3D printer for an enclosure, and a box of 50 heat sinks of various sizes. And I’ll be just fine with the base $60 model, so that’s all I need to spend.
I didn’t have a lot of money as a teenager. My family had 1 computer we all shared. I couldn’t tinker with it, what if I broke it? Cheap Pis were the gateway to my lifelong computer hobby. Because of that hobby, I was able to get a job where part of my role is full-stack web dev. I don’t know what I would be doing now if I didn’t have access to cheap Pis when I was younger.
Especially in this economy, those prices just make me sad :/
So how much is this one going to cost? $80? This company’s greed has gotten out of hand.
Remember when they said this during the chip shortage
“These changes in pricing are not here to stay. As global supply chain issues moderate, we’ll keep revisiting this issue, and we want to get pricing back to where it was as fast as we can,”
To be frank at this point. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a well-established brand name and decent communities Etc. But that doesn’t make up for a lot of the faults. The closed video system with binary blogs and unavailable specifications or availability of copper open source drivers. Leading to wildly different performance from distribution to distribution simply based on who managed to a corporate they proprietary drivers into their distribution. And now the open flirtation with major commercial players as embedded compute units. Making them largely unavailable to the group they were designed for.
I might still get a Raspberry Pi 5. But only the one. All previous generations I had bought two or more of them for various uses. But I was seriously looking at things like the lechee pie4 recently. I think ultimately for the future the way to go is going to be the riscv system. The ISA has been around for roughly a decade at this point though only in the last few years has actual Hardware been getting mass produced and at first it couldn’t really approach even Raspberry Pi levels of performance. The ones coming out right now easily can. And it’s only going to get better with the rapid adoption and development of it.
If the foundation does not focus back on the educational and obvious markets. They are going to lose it. And that may be okay for them. With their other commercial Partners they’ve been selling to over recent years they seem to favor them more anyways.
They’ve generally not been that scarce or unaffordable when I’ve seen them. But I haven’t purposely gone out looking for them. Haven’t really needed to look for them. I still have my original pi’s 1,2,3,and 4s all in working order. But even the back in the depths of 2020-2021 and 2022 when Raspberry Pi 4’s were almost impossible to come by. I would still regularly see two and three’s for sale.
I was trying to acquire Pis from 2020-2022, and I was on every waiting list from every supplier, and if I was even 10 minutes late after getting the in stock email, they’d be out of stock. I had to wait like 9 months for digikey to fill my 3b+ order in 2022.
The only way I could get one was to buy them from scalpers.
We were lucky enough to have a MicroCenter in the area so that probably definitely helped a little bit.
But all of that is part of the reason why I’m actually more excited for some of the new risk V Systems coming out. I think they are probably going to end up filling in what the pi used to be. But only time will tell. We still have yet to see how open the device trees and full driver support will be. But the idea of being able to get one and just slap any binary compatible version of Linux on there and not having to track down the proprietary drivers is a very desirable outcome.
There are dozens of SBCs out there now that are as good, if not better than pis and are actually available. I’ve never heard of or had to install proprietary drivers on any of them.
Well, it apparently can’t do decent 8- and 16-bit anymore, since they’re ditching the composite video jack for hooking it up to a CRT TV. Now it’s only good for newer games designed for LCDs.
They just don’t look the same. They were designed to be displayed on CRT displays, so the quality is actually worse on LCDs. Just look up pictures comparing the two.
You can get a converter box for about $100 that makes it pretty close, though.
These days I'd much rather pay 8-bit games on a 65inch 4k tv via HDMI with shadow mask and (light) scanline emulation filters, than over composite video to a small CRT. To reach their own though.
I’m pretty sure the filters you’re talking about are exactly what the converter I’m talking about does, if we’re not talking about the same thing (unless you’re talking about software filters)
I use a project called MiSTer for most of my retro needs these days, but there are definitely a bunch of other upscalers and things that can create similar effects.
Generally I find the quality of CRT emulation effects is much better, more accurate and more subtle than they used to be.
Some people swear by real CRTs of course, but getting a good picture out of a good CRT is usually an expensive (or at least time sinking) endeavor. It usually involves RGB modding consoles, or at least getting something like S-Video out. Many of us grew up with composite video, but it's pretty gnarly when you go back to it.
You’ll get at least one frame of added latency in the very best case when using original hardware on an LCD. Combine that with a TV that does its own processing and emulation and you’ll have some noticeable input lag. And yes, I know most TVs have a game mode.
Interlacing when doing sprite multiplexing looks shittier on an LCD, too. Unless you do blending at the cost of an additional frame of latency.
Well one of the biggest hurdles to performance on the old raspberry pies with single core performance. So due to the fact that it is a slightly newer node faster etc etc etc it should definitely be better
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