On 2023-01-28, Chris Green <
cl@isbd.net> wrote:
A RaspberryPi 4 for ?209.99, cheap at the price! You can buy a
reasonably decent refurbished desktop or laptop for that much money!
They'd work just as well as the Pi.
I like the Raspberry Pi, I have several, but the world has gone mad!
Well I suppose it makes a change from all those "why is everybody
else buying Pi's? _I'm_ the use case they had in mind!" posts.
Truth be told many of the hobbyist jobs for the Pi can be done
equally well with a generic machine, e.g. a £20 thin client off
ebay. Used of course, but they tend not to break. With the "extras"
like a case, storage, power supply etc as part of the deal. That's
been true ever since the Pi launched without getting into big money.
But still, £210? I spent less than that on this convertible I'm
using now, bought from Amazon about a month ago, returns window
hasn't even closed yet. An "as new" customer return but a very
decent machine for the money.
OTOH where the Pi fits is where it was _really_ aimed at - external interfacing. If you want that your options are comparatively
limited, the likes of USB, PCIe etc are comparatively difficult to
interface to. Most motherboards have onbus SMBus/I2C and some even
provide connectors you can plug into, but try finding easy to code
support for them in mainstream operating systems. The support side
is the other side of the coin.
So, it's market forces at work. Those that _need_ a Pi will pay
for one. Those that are after a cheap machine will go elsewhere.
As I indicated in the opening paragraph my only issue is where
people think they have some kind of unique legitimacy to them,
market forces be damned.
--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.org
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)