I don't expect it either, which is why these things don't make sense anymore, and why I actually recently passed them up for an X86 competitor. Prices of RPi's have inflated, supply has gone down to nothing, and all the while all sorts of competition has entered the SBC scene that provides a much better value.
Don't get me wrong, I love the RPi and I feel like a real cool nerd with bare PCBs sitting around my house, but they're just too expensive now.
That's fine, but that means that it's no longer anything special for a lot of the home server stuff a lot of people do with them.
There are loads of cheap, small (not as small, but small enough for most people not to care) used x86 systems (eg thinkcentre) that I can grab instead.
The cheapest rpi that isn't a zero or pico started at $35. You can buy a Pi 4 Model B 1GB for $35 on pishop.us right now.
The pi 5 won't ever be $35 because that's not the price point it was designed to hit. That's why they have a range of products, so you can buy the one that fits your budget.
Completely abandoned their original hobbyist customer base and sent all their inventory to B2B sales channels and scalpers for several years.
And now that they're finally providing B2C vendors with stock, they've jacked up the prices by 100% to 300%.
Don't forget the Raspberry Pi foundation was supposed to be a nonprofit and the only reason they're the premier SBC is the community. Other boards have better specs, at a better price, with better features. The community support, the hobbyists, are the primary reason why they are what they are.
That's just one bad action, but their had been plenty others recently. Some other comments here have provided information you should read, such as hiring police officers who specialized in using Pi's for surveillance..
The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.
But i have trouble investing further into them.
They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:
The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)
That is so dump.
Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.
They now require a special power supply for it to work else it just crashes under load. Their use of USB C is insanely confusing because it doesn't work with any normal USB C psu.
This power supply costs 15 bucks which conveniently isn't included in the price. Also a heat sink that costs 6 bucks.
Also they stuck with micro hdmi which sucks. (even more special accessories needed)
The required accessories almost cost as much as just an old pi.
I hope the community jumps over to Rockchip based boards soon. Pi has taken the communities open source efforts and spit in their face.
Risc5 is also interesting but that seems to be a far bigger task since it need recompilation of a lot of existing stuff
Wow, at the start of this comment i thought you were just being overly negative, but one by one, each point crushed me a little more. it's so sad what's become of this once great little product. The special power supply is a complete and total deal breaker for so many reasons. that eliminated so many use cases for me. And the lack of a standard hdmi port (or even usb c video output) is just the shtty cherry on top.
Yeah power seems like such a small thing but for an SBC it's a pretty big deal.
The power usage is also pretty crushing for it the Pi's usage in hobby Robotics. Finally we have some computing power but now it's unusable because how are you going to get 5V5A from a powerbank? We could power the Pi4 from a decent USB C supporting powerbank, But this is no longer the case for the Pi5.
If they supported "normal" USB PD then at least a powerbank with quick-charge support (9v3a) would work and give you the same total 25W wattage. And the PD USB chargers would have been way cheaper because 9v3A get mass produced. This 5V5A is some Apple tier of "propriatary" standard and I really wonder why they did it.
Is there a RasPi alternative that's competitive in price and has PCI-e support? It's been a dream project of mine for quite some time to pair an ultra low power SoC to a GPU in order to make a crazy overpowered Folding@Home or BOINC cluster.
I could say the Orange Pi 5, however Orange Pi's ports currently tend to only work with specific accessories which they already wrote drivers for themselves. It's not like they're blocking other devices, but just like how RPI still needs a lot of work to support GPU's with drivers, Orange Pi probably needs even more.
The integrated GPU is pretty good though.
Most alternatives to RPI use a Rockchip such as the RK3566 for mid range and RK3588 for high end stuff.
There's also the new cheap 15 bucks LuckFox Pico with Rockchip RV1106 with a small NPU for AI projects, kind of a Pi Pico alternative.
I'm assuming it's like the Nintendo switch USBC lead which technically is standard but doesn't really work to charge anything else. but at least you can use normal USBC leads to charge the switch so it's not too bad.
I think pi is on the road to mainstream. Probably time to shift to an open source hardware competitor to boost it. Not saying pi is bad, I have one and its great. Those like me who love tinkering should consider going the extra mile and „radicalize“ themselves to open hardware. The project I hear the most of is Banana-PI. https://www.banana-pi.org
Most alternatives use Rockchips such as Rk3566 or 3588 which are better in every way to the Pi chips of their respective price points. As long as they don't use the Allwinner chips it's usually decent out of the box but still a bit lacking.
I like Orange Pi more. They have pretty good out of the box documentation and a good range of hardware.
Radxa is also an option but they seem to offer the same stuff as Orange Pi but more expensive.
I used a lepotato on my last project in place of a pi3 but libre computer totally has rockchip boards available as well. Price wise seemed decent, documentation was decent enough for me and more importantly I could actually get one.
4GB of DDR4 is a lot worse than 8GB of DDR3. Those (slightly) older business SFF computers are plenty capable compared to the pi and their software support is at least as strong.
You're also going to have to add several peripherals to the pi that aren't included in the price.
Is it possible to get these pi's for that price now though? Because I member 2 years ago looking at paying rediculous scalper pricing for a pi to run octoprint on, and by the grace of my brother having a spare one was able to avoid spending 150 bucks on scalper bullshit.
It comes with built in storage and a power supply, plus a passive cooling system, a case obviously, and removable RAM up to 16gb. It has dual display port, idk about resolution, I run it headless anyway. There is also a bigger version with a pice slot.
Yeah I am loving all these micro Linux computer options. Not much bigger than a raspberry pi but it's a full computer. If you need gpio you can hook up an Arduino through USB and connect super easily. The one I have been using even has an integrated video card. All for around $100 and they are always in stock lol.
I thought I would love a power button but after installing my pi4 in a case with one, I found myself setting the jumper to “always on” after every small power outage took my server offline and I had to drag my lazy butt to my pi to turn it back on.