alt Hacker NewsRaspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.
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> But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis.
Feelings over facts, at least you acknowledge it.
The success of (and the issues with) the raspberry pi mainly derive from it being mistaken for a good home-server platform. It's not, it's awful for that use case. For pretending it to be an embedded systems platform (either for prototyping or to later target the compute modules for production usage) sure, it's great.
It's all fine as long as the (computing) needs are low and budget is not an issue.
I would be curious to see if some qualcomm/snapdragon mini PCs could embrace the tinker-ability and power consumption approach and add some nice competition there
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> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.
It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).
But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.