this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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The Pi foundation screwed over its original customer base by diverting practically ALL available inventory to business customers. Good riddance.
Once they hired that former cop who bragged about using these RPI's for "legal" surveillance police operations, I was done with them. This goes completely against the DIY spirit. There are so many better options out there without cops and without snarky Twitter social media managers.
What ever happened with all that? Do they still work there?
What is a good alternative you would recommend?
Yes, Pine64 is absolutely an organization that adheres to their stated ethos. They are what the Pi foundation should have been, but only pretends to be.
I dunno about ethos, but I do know Pine can also make false claims. I bought a Rock64 years back and they touted it as 4k60 video capable with an integrated GPU and that wasn't realistic at all. The software stack was still very immature on release. From their own wiki, years later, it still doesn't work and key parts still haven't been upstreamed.
Libre computer is pretty good too. I'm a big fan of the Libre computer renegade
The foundation prioritized customers relying on the pis to stay in business over tinkerers and enthusiasts. More harm and suffering would have been done by leaving those customers high and dry. Tinkerers were inconvenienced so that people could continue putting food on the table.
All of this caused by a once in a lifetime global catastrophe that killed millions of people.
Just, have some perspective.
Sure, for the first year, but it's been multiple years now. What's their excuse after the chip shortage ended?
They had goodwill, but that can't, and shouldn't be indefinite.
You're free to judge them on your own terms, as am I, but I don't think mine are unreasonable.
I would really recommend watching Jeff Geerling's video where he went to the UK to interview the rPi guys. It's really illuminating.
Also, we are even completely out of the chip shortage today. Demand for SBCs/ SOC chips in particular has skyrocketed. We are in stage 3 of the technology adoption curve, Early Majority, and people are still acting like it's 2018 and we're in the Early Adopter stage.
SBCs are everywhere around you now. You don't see them because they're small and easy to hide but they're being integrated into displays, signage, sensors and monitoring, even scooter rentals.
I have watched it. It was a very well done piece of PR and damage control. You're free to extend indefinite goodwill and understanding to their organization, but mine is used up.
They've basically cut off consumer supply for multiple years now, so you can keep on making excuses, but maybe ask yourself if you actually even have a line they can cross, or if your just being a fanboy.
I don't mean that as pejorative, but I don't know what else to call it, except for being a simp, but that's a much harder word to use and not come off as mean or angry at you, which I'm not.
Why business would buy raspberries? I am out of the loop.
There are good business use cases for Pi's, you can search online to learn more if you want.
That's not the issue. The Raspberry Pi Foundation stopped supplying retail resellers and shipped 99% of ALL of their inventory to business customers for the past several years. Which is why you can't find consistent stock, and why scalpers are mysteriously the only ones able to have reliable inventory.
It's not a secret, you can look up any number of news stories covering it. Originally they could blame the chip shortage, but long after that's over, they're still diverting almost everything they manufacture to business channels, and screwing over the hobbyists who built their brand.
Screw them. I'm not supporting them with my money ever again, and I have double digit amounts going back to the RPi2.
Lol. Maybe I should sell my inventory. Still have like 2 RPI zero, 3 RPI3B+, 2 RPI4 and one RPI400.. 😅 Their price is currently like 3-4x higher than I bought.
It's not even just built their brand, built the damn software, documentation, did a lot of the testing and put up with pis being a bit dodgy out of the box for a year every time a new model came out.
So, they’re really easy to work with and relatively affordable, so great for prototyping, and acceptable for production if a company wants to get stuff out the door without getting a proper custom built solution that would be better in the long run.
When spin (electric scooter app rental company) pulled out of Seattle, they didn’t pick up a lot of the scooters there. People started pulling them apart when it was deemed they were legally abandoned, and it turned out they were all running on raspberry pi’s as their brains.
Ultimately it’s save money on the development side since it allows companies to use less experienced or specialized employees. It’s obviously expensive in the long term since a custom built system that only does what you need it to would cost less
That's so cool! Thanks!
For example:
https://farm.bot/
There are others. Plenty of small/medium businesses just don't have the resources to develop small computers and the matching software stack. In that regards, the RPi is an appealing choice.
This thing looks so fucking cool and simultaneously somewhat dystopian
I guess because it's a cheap way to do embedded computing? Idk.