Raspberry Pi launches its IPO
Raspberry Pi launches its IPO
It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
Sooner or later capitalism ruins everything.
Then it's a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy.
We need regulation on corporations to keep them in check.
I'm willing to bet they'll start adding telemetry features in RPiOS for "quality purposes" a few years from now.
They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.
Isn't the GPU documented now?
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545
There are reverse engineered docs as well: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv
AI nonsense privacy disrespecting "feature" coming next week
Announcing: Raspberry pi recall
Tech companies as soon as they are publicly traded:
Let the enshitification begin!
The Pi5 is already a shitshow with crazy power usage requiring a special power supply instead of a normal USB C phone charger.
We're lucky that the SBC space has gotten really solid over the last couple years. ARM-based, X86-based, and even some RISC-V systems.
The PI isn't the only only game in town now, and actually gets beat in several different applications depending on use case.
As shareholder value and line-must-go-up takes over the company culture, progress and innovation will happen more and more in the hands of companies and orgs that actually care about their product's quality and features.
Still disappointing though, the Pi was my first introduction to IoT and low power computing.
They've crossed the event horizon of enshitification.
N100 mini PCs are where it's at these days anyways. Unless you need the GPIO pins or are running some weird niche configuration, you're better off grabbing any N100, they're cheaper too.
After some light searching, am I missing something? I don't see n100 cheaper than rpi 5
PIs are kind of screwed from N* on the higher power end and ESP32 (or similar high power micro controllers) the lower end.
It's become an underpowered middle player no one needs.
It was good while it lasted. PI3's for $30 we're amazing.
Added benefit of most using low power intel CPUs
They're not actually lower powered, they just have a TDP limit set.
E.g. A 8500 and 8500T will idle at the same power consumption, but the 8500T has a TDP limit set.
GPIOs are the easy bit. You can get those no issue on x86. It's I2C and SPI that are the issue with x86. You can get the buses sure, but all the device drivers are Device Tree based. You can't just throw in Device Tree overlays on x86.
Idk, with I2C if it's not something that needs a kernel level driver, there usually isn't a problem with interacting with it from user space, for example basically all RAM RGB controllers are I2C and OpenRGB has no problem with them. I'm pretty sure I've only ever used an I2C device tree overlay for an RTC.
Also I2C/SMBus is present everywhere on x86, like some graphics cards expose it through their HDMI ports, even some server motherboards have a header for it; but for GPIO I'm unaware of any motherboards that expose it, so good luck researching the chipset and tracing out the pins.
I have a pi 4, how would the transfer work? Can you install pios on the n100 and just clone stuff over?
N100 is a standard Intel x86 family chip, so no. Plenty of power though, so you'd be able to install any Linux distro or even Windows if you wanted to disgust Lemmy.
Or get a used Thinkcentre tiny, way cheaper. Some have a serial out too.
Can you swap the hard drive between any generation and still have it boot and work 100%? To me that was the second biggest feature after all the gpio and i2c buses I used to hack all manner of stuff together. Heck I even have a cargo trailer powered by a pi!
I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs
but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it's a soulless corporate husk of what it one was
As long as I'm not locked into using their OS on their hardware I'll still be interested. I have a 3,4&5 doing various tasks around my house and enjoy the little boards.
I had never heard of radxa. Looks awesome!
Orange PI comes to mind, getting better over time too.
Raspberry Pi has been over priced for a long time. I'm not saying they've been a net positive or negative, but if you think this will make them a bad company then I think they've been pretty bad for a bit.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.
Mostly that IPOs put companies into 'infinite growth mode' which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can't just do 'good enough' anymore.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they'll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they're reporting to shareholders?
Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.
It doesn't always end this way but often enough to worry about it...
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we've basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don't care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don't get paid for their music, this is why.
They did spend the last few years screwing over any customer that wasn't some giant corporation on a product that was originally created as a low cost tool for educational purposes.
They think that it's gonna ruin the company
And they're right.
There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.
And the "enshittification" comments seem odd too.
"Enshittification" isn't some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.
That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.
But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don't have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.
In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
We're mostly negative on publicly traded companies because their ceo is legally obligated to squeeze blood from a stone or they quite literally will get sued by the shareholders, plenty of examples out there. The exceptions are usually there because the previous owners wrote contracts, etc to help keep the company as it was prior but even then it only works for so long. Check out Ben and Jerry's and their whole debacle on the subject.
When a company takes on shareholders, whatever goals, mission, or ethos they had is erased. They now exist as a vehicle to make as much money as possible at literally any cost. That's it. Was nice while it lasted.
Literally my exact first thought, but you were more eloquent.
So, what are the alternatives?
https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs
There are so many!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
There's tons of similar SBC's out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They're all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards... but it's still not quite as good.I got a 'LePotato' a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.
Yep, using one to run clipper for my 3d printer with armbian as the OS. It's been rock solid for me. There obviously some adaptation and discovery when trying to use the io as it's similar-but-not the same as the raspberry pi io and manipulating it is not the same. But it works, it was available, it was competitively cheap, and it's been stable
Plus I get to say I'm running my 3d printer on a potato
LePotato is a great budget board for pi-hole.
I think Pine64 is pretty cool.
Radxa as well. I have a Rock Pi 4B running as my home server and it has been a great Pi 4 alternative. I also have an Indiedroid Nova with RK3588S which should be better than the Pi 5 bit the GPU drovers aren't quite there yet. Once GPU drivers are in it should be an incredible board.
I like your attitude!
Oh jees... welp it was great while it lasted.
Welp. Fuck Raspberry Pi. The entire stock market is one big scam.
Got my last Pi (RBP5) to try to set up a simple TV player under linux... unfortunately the performance was shit... had to go with Android and it's barely OK (bang for buck)
With the IPO I expect RBP are going to become more expensive and significantly enshitified... so that's that
? RPi5 is something like 2x faster than RPi4. Are you using some format that RPi doesn't accelerate? Or are you running something heavy?
I almost picked up an RPi5 to replace my NAS, but the SATA hat was out of stock so I just did a smaller upgrade with stuff laying around my house (Phenom II x4 -> Ryzen 1700, mostly for power savings).
What software were you running?
I was planning to use it to drive one of my TVs, so basically to be an HDTV player.
The Raspbian OS was fine, the Emby client would not start (segmentation fault) and the performance on the web client was not great.
Now on Android, Emby client runs pretty well (better than on the FireTV sticks I am trying to replace) but I could not get Google Play working (yet) which left me without F1TV (the only "other" vid app I care about for now to run on the TV)
Was hoping to set up a Pihole soon but now this, ugh! Any other alternatives???
There's tons of cheap Dell computers with small form factor and much better specs...
I have a couple and they are great machines but don't completely fill the space for the Pi which works great in embedded systems along with having so many accessories, hats, etc.
You can buy some old thinclient lenovos on eBay for super cheap.
There's other board manufacturers as well... basically just replace "raspberry" with some other fruit and there's probably a Pi of it
I personally think the best thing to do is find a used Celeron laptop and disable the lid switch setting. Now you've got a server with a built in UPS.
Or just fire it up in a docker container because you're already running Linux right? RIGHT?
If you want a SBC, a lepotato works really well, supposed to be more performant than a 3B. I used as an alternate to a raspberry pi for a klipper setup, running armbian on it now.
There are updated versions of it as well if you need more performance, but they're cheaper than an equivalent pi and importantly, purchasable which was an issue when I was putting together that printer.
If you don't need the GPIO then buy a small form factor office PC like a Dell Optiplex Micro or a Lenovo/HP equivalent. They cost about the same on the used market, are more performant without the ARM headache and use only marginally more power (maybe 5-10w more at idle).
I bought a router that supports OpenWRT, and then installed AdGuard right on my router
Odroid has some nice boards, though I find them pricey.
Shit. Need to grab a couple spare Pis now while they’re still good.
It could be neat if there was such a thing as like a FairPi (like FairPhone I mean, e.g. repairable). Arguably that would have almost defeated the main purpose of a $5 USD Pi, but sustainability is still cool, for those of us willing to pay 3x the price or whatever.
:(
Here's to hoping a solid sbc with gpio pins and solid software support shows up as a competitor to keep them in check?
fuck us
As long as Raspberry Pi doesn't start ripping off their customers, I will happily stay with them. Most other SBCs are made by Chinese companies, which I definitely won't buy. Hell no, I'm not supporting the Chinese economy.
As long as Raspberry Pi doesn't start ripping off their customers
Give it 2 weeks (max) after the IPO
Hell no, I'm not supporting the Chinese economy.
Lol, I agree with you, but realistically you probably have only avoided a fraction of Chinese made crap
I'd be amazed if most of the Pi components weren't from China but feel free to correct me.
I don't so much care where it's made. The real selling point, to me, for Pi is that their products are well documented, in English, and solutions for problems are easily googled. There's tons of SBCs out there, some of them even inexpensive, but I can't tell if any are going to last longer than a single production run. Meanwhile, I can still buy a Pi 3 after almost a decade. Or I can take the hat I made for a Pi3, plug it straight into a new Pi Zero, and expect it to work without changes.
IPO is a big step down the path to enshittification, especially when there's no clear, dominant alternative.
Might be good, maybe we’ll get an OS competitor then. It’s harder for hardware, but not impossible. An open source, fabless microcontroller built by a nonprofit, perhaps? A lot of universities have labs with the budget to allocate for this as part of a consortium
I like your optimism best to look on the bright side and all— curious what do you mean by fabless? Do they not require as complex facilities because they’re a larger process or something? Or for some other reason?
I was thinking maybe there could be different SoCs or machine learning oriented hardware, and if there are multiple designs then they could be put together somewhere else. Some research labs are specializing in different types of semiconductor devices, which I think might be interesting to explore on a microcontroller
been slowly replacing the PLCs with PIs at my work.
I'm sorry but all of these doom and gloom comments are insufferable.
A. The raspberry pis that you have known and loved are all still around and, considering inflation, cheaper than ever. If you're complaining about prices, stop buying from scalpers!
B. All this talk of enshittification and decline is purely and 100% speculative. You are acting like your catastrophic fears are a forgone conclusion when they're, at best, a guess.
You are a pretty optimistic person.
Maybe. I'll be the first one to call out bad behavior but at this point it's just knee jerk anticorporate fervor.
The worst thing raspberry pi ever did is dare to be an electronic company during the worst electronics part shortage in our lifetime. People complaining they couldn't get a pi to do their dinky personal project are the epitome of having first world problems. Prices and availability have been back to normal for over a year now and people still gripe about it. I'm just over it.