See:-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-4-8GB-RAM/dp/B089LZ7KB8?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A20MCJQ5XUMXG9

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!

--
Chris Green
·

Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-4-8GB-RAM/dp/B089LZ7KB8?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A20MCJQ5XUMXG9
>
> 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.

With a desktop, you don't have the refinements around power
consumption so it'll potentially cost more in electricity long-term
than an over-priced Pi4 if it's on all the time. That might apply
to a lesser degree with most laptops too, and those might also
suffer from over-heating problems.

So for an always-on home application, I can see why someone would
prefer a Pi4 to a regular PC even at that price. However once
you're in that price range there are a lot of other SBCs to choose
from as well, so it might still be mad to pay that much.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

> 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.

There are some RPi "clones" out there still going for less, and some of
them are actually available to buy. I have not tried any of them, but some
of the Libre boards are still listing for US$30 or so, and I think the
Orange Pis are also still cheaper (and may have a little more horse power).

* SLMR 2.1a * Veni, Vidi, Velcro. (I came, I saw, I stuck around)

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

On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 20:44:07 -0000 (UTC), Andrew Smallshaw
<andrews@sdf.org> declaimed the following:

>OTOH where the Pi fits is where it was _really_ aimed at - external
>interfacing. If you want that your options are comparatively

And that is limited to just digital I/O compared to a BeagleBone Black
running a Debian release (the BBB has two sets of I/O pins, supports true
analog input and PWM outputs, and two programmable realtime units [PRUs,
meant for developing I/O protocols without impacting main processor]). The
BeagleBone AI has onboard DSP, twice the PRUs, and same form factor as the
BBB. Oh, and they have onboard flash memory so one /can/ run without using
an SD card.

--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
> Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
>> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-4-8GB-RAM/dp/B089LZ7KB8?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A20MCJQ5XUMXG9
>>
>> 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.
>
> So for an always-on home application, I can see why someone would
> prefer a Pi4 to a regular PC even at that price. However once
> you're in that price range there are a lot of other SBCs to choose
> from as well, so it might still be mad to pay that much.

Also, if you have a bit of patience, you can still buy a Raspberry Pi
without lining the pockets of the scalpers. You need to act quickly when
they pop up here:

https://rpilocator.com/feed/

--
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(IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
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