Time to Dump the Raspberry Pi! 

Just get a cheapish laptop, max out the RAM, and put everything in VMs and containers. It's like having a server with a built in UPS.

Raspberry Pi was way too expensive since 2020, I don't think the price will ever go down. COVID is just a lame excuse imo.

My option has been to use old laptop mobos.

To me, it's crazy that a Pi costs more than a cheap phone, How is it that they can include a screen, and battery etc for less than a pi while basically offering the same amount of computing power

Thinclients are also another good option. I recent bought one to run Proxmox and a few containers on. You can pick up a 6th gen Intel in a thinclient for about the same price as a NUK (and often less), but with dual sodimm slots, sata and m.2, upgradeable internal wifi/bt (m.2), usb 3 and c and some even allow use of the desktop version of the processor, just make sure your cooling solution is up to scratch. My PFsense installation, including Snort, PFblockerNG and VPN is running on a Celeron J3160 and it handles it extremely well. Load average is between about 3% and 10% on average.

Rob, Raspberry Pi is manufactured in a Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales, not China. They probably get components from all over the place but that is where it is all put together.

An option are used client PC's. Those that companies use at work stations for example. You can get them for 35 USD and already with powersupply etc. Mostly they are even much stronger regarding CPU and RAM, compared to a Pi.

Are you sure, that the RPI is produced in China? All my RPis declared to be make in UK, exept my very first RPi1B (256MByte). Of course the supply-chains depends on China, but this is also true for every complex product.

I have two of the first gen NUCs and still use them as HTPCs. Both running debian server with KDE flawlessly. In fact one of them was the DC3217IYR, the limited edition red case with golden dragon on it. It sits proudly in my living room still.

This is a great and informative video! Thank you Rob!

This is an interesting video as I have been using the Raspberry Pi since it came out in 2011 and I have been also using other SBCs from China like the Asus Tinkerboard, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Odroid XU4, NanoPi Neo and several others. I also do my own Linux builds with Gentoo Linux that I have been using as my main OS for 20 years now. The Raspberry Pi has been a victim of its own success and it's clear that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has "bitten off more than it can chew" because the Foundation got its initial investment from certain suppliers to whom it had to prioritise supplies going forward - so those investors, rightly or wrongly, are now getting any available supplies over and above anyone else who needs them. From my perspective, it doesn't bother me - I purchased enough Pi's to have enough for my needs plus I have those other SBCs above and I can build Gentoo Linux how I want to on any of them. Most of those boards are also supported by Armbian Linux. There's no way I am paying above normal retail price for a Pi, but I think the Intel NUCs are a waste of money when, on eBay, it's easy to pick up a small and used SFF PC made by Dell, HP or Lenovo for about $50 with a 3rd or 4th generation Core i5 CPU and usually 8 GB RAM. These are great value at the moment because of so many "sheep" buying new PCs rushing to upgrade to Windows 11 rubbish. Once again, this is an issue of "effort in = reward out". There are solutions and good alternative to Raspberry Pi boards as long as people are prepared to put in effort to learn how to build the best kind of computer solutions for their needs.

I really love you and you videos! Thanks so much x

The raspberry pi fulfilled the exact purpose it was meant to. I have a pi400, which at the time was the only one worth the price, and a couple rp2040 micro controllers. Being new to micro controllers and electronics, it is still my favorite toy 😄

Very happy with this video/info. Thank you !

Vintage repaired, and/or upgraded is my low-cost option. Over the years it blows my mind at the number of usable desktops, laptops, tablets, and even high end business servers tossed in dumpsters, and recycle bins.

Yes we should support companies who don't rely totally on China.

Thanks for the info.. I was curious about the SBC market and if it had recovered, obviously it hasn't, I've looked at the Asus tinker board and the UDOO SBC made in Italy

The Pi is assembled in the UK (by Sony), but like every other electronic device, a lot of the components come from Asia, (principally China). Jeff Geerling recently interviews Eben Upton, who answers a lot of the issues raised here.

No mention of the GIPO's on the PI? I like the PI because it is to easy to implement various devices and sensors. Curently I use a PI running open source Mycoco as the control system for my greenhouse. I've looked at the little PC's but no easy way to interface with external devices.

@Rob - The component shortage has hit everyone - EVERYONE - surprisingly hard. I have friends building specialist mesh networking systems and lead times went from "how many do you want" to "wait time over 1 year" on almost every single component, he showed me on Altium. The Chinese supply chain collapse has hit everyone who doesn't have political clout in China (like Apple seems to), those sourcing non-Chinese components all of a sudden find themselves competing for dwindling stocks with those who did. Chinese OEMs have the advantage of being literally down the road from wholesale operations and often have first dib at components, etc. - they can apply local pressure and suppliers KNOW that the international clients are going away at some point so they want to favour their domestic makers. Eben Upton referenced the logistics problems they've been dealing with for a LONG time after COVID rattled the entire component supply chain. They had to balance enterprise compute-module supply contracts with retail stock availability, the latter which seems to have been hit REALLY hard by scalpers and price gouging and the former by frightened industrial customers who are buying as many as they can to maintain buffer stocks internally in case of failure or expanded requirements. Pis are indeed manufactured in the UK in a Sony facility in Wales I believe - they of course are made from components manufactured in China like everyone else. German cars are jam packed with parts that have come straight from China, disaggregating them from the supply chain is something that’s actively going on right now and is part of the gradual collapse of globalisation as we used to know it; expect component supplies to be very weird and often quite strained for a very long time apparently. I do think a lot of people - myself included - have mis-used Pis but to be fair that's not something you can realise until you've used one in a practical capacity. The flooding of the used market with those lovely little micro-sized corporate desktops makes them a wildly more attractive option at the pricepoint the Pi should normally sit at - and I think that's a vastly better option for many who want that contained auxiliary desktop system. Older notebooks are also superb for this as they are designed from the outset for low power consumption and even their usually shot batteries can provide even brief UPS protection to an extent. I see the future for SBCs like the Pi - which I think will definitely return to dominance especially upon release of the Pi 5 - as being more with edge computing solutions, low power/cost messaging and task hubs, etc. Desktop use is its own kind of hell it seems - and is abnormally affected by the lack of software support which really does affect almost every non RPiF product more than it does theirs, even with wonderful projects like DietPi and Armbian filling that desperately desperately desperately need function. NUCs being x86 based sees them benefit heavily from almost every area with OS development, particularly for security releases where I’d argue that it’s generally a superior platform if you’re building most security products (unless you really need the lower power profile for mobility, etc.). Updates for *nix based anything is just that much faster and I can’t see this changing given how ARM chips tend to be used in real life.

Ill keep recommending raspberry pis. Ive been using an rpi4 8gb since the beginning (before?) Covid and it has done amazingly well as my media server and player

Very interesting to hear your opinion on this subject as a professional provider of IT solutions. Nice to see the solution can be done by making use of domestic sources of hardware.

I've been getting the Libre Potato computer off Amazon for a while now, just picked up another one last week - $35 and it's pretty much identical to a RPi 3B+. Only difference is it doesn't have WiFi (I hard wire everything I can so I don't mind.) Otherwise it's almost identical.

I was looking for a Pi 4 for a project and came to the same conclusion that these Mini PCs are a better choice at the moment, and ended up buying a Beelink Mini PC

Thanks again for great material insight/breakdown Do you think AI is affecting the price in some way?

Once the price of the of the Raspberry PI became similar to other small form factor pc's then obviously, the market would change quite rapidly. As you point out, the small form factor pc's run standard operating systems, are reliable and powerful. Thanks for sharing this.

Yes! I needed a new raspberry pie about a month ago and couldn't believe how ridiculously expensive they had become. I ended up getting a CTONE Mini Micro PC Intel 11th Gen N5095 and absolutely love it! Such great performance and the cooling fan is nice and quiet. And who knows when the next raspberry pi will come out? If ever?

Old laptops and mini PCs have always been an option for small linux servers and such. That is not why RPi's became popular. Their small form factor, low power requirements, and GPIO pins is what made them special. So, your suggestions do not address the main reason most people buy RPi's. Other SBC systems like Orange Pi , Odroid, Beagle bones, etc come closer to the mark.

Recently I bought an Orange Pi5, but the dev team simply does not deliver! It takes forever to upgrade the firmware. So sad, because the chipset is on point - perfect for portability and some basic work (it is possible to run even KDEnLive or Gimp, not that it is worthed, but simply possible).

Hi Rob. I've been playing with variants of the Lenovo M900's. They t0o support SATA AND NVMe SSD's. They can be found for less than $200 Canadian and I am measuring some pretty low amount of power consumption. I hope this helps.

The problem is the development support. We like it or not but raspberry pi is the only single board comp which has a lot of software support by the community. However, yes there is supply chain problem and comparing with other boards example orange pi5, raspberry pi 4 is slow

Great info, thank you Rob!

NUCs tend to run hot and have noisy high pitched fan that get annoying on moderate to high CPU loads. Regarding the Chinese NUC alternative, I'm not sure I'd trust their firmware. One of the big draws for me toward rpi4 were that they can run silently and consume much lower power per instruction, and you'd lose both those with a NUC.

I couldn't agree more about the Raspberry Pis. I have moved on too. I bought a couple of Beelinks this year. One is the Ryzen 5 5600H variant, the other, an 12th Gen Core i5-1235U variant. The i5 is slightly faster for tasks and the Ryzen 5 does 3D gaming much, much better for anyone curious. Both are very small, run very well, are expandable and overall, much more interesting and powerful than any raspberry pi in any configuration.

The orange pi 5 is a very good alternative in the price bracket

I like Raspberry pi's but really only when I'm using the Zero (2W) for it's ultra-small form factor, or a CM4 because of the customizable boards. I thought about getting one for my home server but I ended up using a n6005 ITX motherboard, which I think isn't too far from using a NUC.

New Sub! Dryden, Michigan I Love My RPi's 2/3/4, but I've been Telling people, Give me your old computers, Dont Trash Em. Back in the Early 2k's I could turn Virtually anything into a Fully Functional Linux Desktop. Now I Tear Down Trash PCs I collect & teach my Daughters how to build computers or Build BATOCERA Game systems for themselves Great Job!

The best thing about raspberrys IMO is that their are extremely standardized, if you want to run a homelab, getting several Pi 4s means that when you want to expand you add another Pi, when one dies you get another pi, it's always the same hardware, same feature set, you never get surprises. All the nuisance of a board will vary from mini pc to mini pc, but when you always deal with the very same model of board, there are no surprises, you know what you get. Sadly they are not available, and they are NOT $35~ (or $55 on the 4gb model), they have become expensive and hard to get, making the whole appeal for me gone.

Only one question, how would you replace the GPIO pin connectors with those machines?

have bought the NUC7 and could not manage to get the SD-Card-Reader to work, it consists of an Alcor Chipset not supported by Linux in any means, apart from that i totally agree with its utilisation for Debian nevertheless.

Honestly I'm going to look into doing TuringPi's options with their compute modules and Cluster board to make a server for my hobby shop.

I got lucky as covid was springing - I was having my second 2u server rack Mount kit being finished up... Now 24 pies on the rack... And few more here and there.. Great low powered solution

The NUC is 12-19 volts if my reading is correct. How well would this run on a 'camper' battery --- I use my PI as a media server (plex) and want to be able to use it when I do not have shore power

Rasberry Pi 5 double spec of 4. Due out end of Oct. I'd like to buy something soon for a light browsing with 2 hd monitors. What is your take on this new offering?

i have two cheap nuc, one used for office server, the other as home server. they are very good (except for the nic chip). i would buy only the raspi 400 for nostalgia.

Do you recommend any specific adapter to break out any General Purpose I/O (GPIO) ports for the NUC?

I've based a product around RPi 3s and 4s, and was also hit by the problematic supply chain. I've recently started testing a handful of Inovato Quadras as a replacement, and have been mostly happy. You might try one. They currently running about $35, and are roughly equivalent to the RPi 3 in performance (at least for my purposes).

If you get a NUC, get the one with the quad core Pentium instead of the Celeron. I don't remember the models I have, but, I have two of the Pentiums and one of the Celeron dual core ones. The Celeron is noticeably slower. I think I've had the ones that I have for around 10 years. I'm running Windows 10 on them. They are a bit slow, but, usable. I mainly use them for Remote Desktoping into work, which they work totally fine for. It seems like Intel isn't really focusing on the low end ones anymore as near as I can tell.

Alternative SBCs I've been looking at are the Orange PI 5, Khadas VIM1S, NanoPi R6S

they have made hardware as good or better but the support is just not there for beginner hobbyists to learn compared to the Pi . new options are good.

Thanks for doing the Home Work..

Good video, thanks. I got fed-up trying to locate a reasonably-priced Pi, but gave up and got a NUC.

I too have a lot of Raspberry Pi's most of which now live unused in a cardboard box. I cannot buy an 8Gb Pi 4 for either love or money and more often than not Pi's are perpetually out of stock. The major issue has become that the Pi does not have an M.2 interface but insists on fiddly SD cards that eventually die after a year or two. I am now using Intel NUC mini computers instead of Pi's. Edit: I actually wrote this before I reached the NUC section in your video. The NUC's are pricey, but they are available AND can be upgraded with RAM and M.2 SSD's or SATA drives..

Good option for a little home NAS or another stand-alone device, but not that easy to implement into most project builds.

ive been using an old android tv box with armbian for a while. can get them cheap as chips second hand

Raspberry pi foundaation has shifted their focus to industry and abandonded their roots, the hobbiest and educational market. The reasons for all the scalping is because the businesses that the PI foundation is focusing on supplying turn around and scalp them. The foundation is to blame for the shortage as a result, and they can eat my shorts. I wont deal with PI again

Picked up a beelink with an N100 500gb ram & 512SSD for $160 on lightning deal for a project. Solid choice over a raspberry pi even before price increase

One more comment to get the facts straight. Raspberry pi4’s are mostly assembled at a Sony factory in the UK. Raspberry pi Pico boards assembled in Japan. The processors come from Samsung in South Korea or TSMC in Taiwan, only. Raspberry pi was initially assembled in China, but only a few are assembled there now. There are, of course, some parts that come from China, as with all products, including Intel’s. Pi made 6 million Pi4 last year. The problem is the demand was probably closer to 12 million. It’s taking them a while to catch up. The Pi Foundation made a conscious decision to prioritize delivery to small businesses so as to not put them out of business, rather than to make the limited stock available to hobbyists. Whether that is right or wrong can be argued, but it’s not like they haven’t been building pi boards for the last 3 years.

Rob, they prioritiesed industry and education. The PIs will be back at regular pricing by Q3 this year.

Rob, from what you've said I can tell you that you've been using RPis for projects it wasnt directly designed for. You want a portable, low-price desktop replacement of which there are plenty in recent years. Pi is more of a microcomputer build to be tinkered with by hobbyists.

I would add one more mini pc I am using. This is the Zotac Zbox CI325 nano. You can get it for about 170 US$ with 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM. It comes with two 1 Gb/s LAN interfaces. I am using it for Kodi clients and one is running my firewall. The WLAN-Modul can be removed without any problem, if not needed. Lubuntu runs very smooth. Best off all it has no fan.

What a coincidence, Intel NUC and RPI both were introduced in 2012 (if my research is accurate).

Have you considered looking for a solution with open source firmware, such as the RockPro64?

With the Raspberry Pi 5 coming out in a few days, does that change your opinion at all?

About a year ago I started using SBCs on small robot projects. I had a Pi 3b lying around, so I started with that. However I wanted to use an SBC with a smaller form factor. Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2 lines were unavailable. I tried an Orange Pi but it ran so hot it fried the CPU within hours. I moved to Banana Pi and have been very satisfied.BPi will be the only SBC I wil use from hereon in.

One can use old mac mini too. I personally use 2014 for linux-based self-hosting. But I was lucky to buy 16gb ram config at a very decent price.

I bought a 4B not long ago at list price. The supply problem seems to finally be resolving. I agree, the RPi's were not worth the money that the scalpers were charging. At MSRP they are quite cost effective and the tech is mature and stable. At over $100, they were not particularly attractive unless replicating someone else's build that specifies a Pi. There is a method for booting the Pi from a USB device. A small SSD might make for a faster boot. I haven't found boot speed to be a real issue, though.

it seems like there's no advantage to have the x86 instruction set if you're running Linux. In fact, usually you get less performance/efficiency for your dollar when running linux than on an x86 than you do on a number of other non-x86 machines

Yeah I have a pi still but I used to have five of them and sold four for more than double the original price during covid but all my customers were happy because despite doubling my money they got a decent deal compared to amazon or ebay.

What are your thoughts on the pi 5 shipping late this month.

I have 2) raspberry pi’s 2 gig bought before the shortage of 2021. I used one as a OMV server, the other is a security cam server. I’m slowly moving away from the pi, moving to unraid w an old PC

What about Intel Celeron based laptops? Many of them can be had between $60 and $150 at places like Microcenter. A Microsoft Surface Laptop SE 11.6" is $130 and includes a built in "UPS" keyboard, trackpad and monitor all in one. It's limited to USB type C Gen 1 but at over 3Gb/s real world speeds, that might be enough?

I bought a pipo x8 pro for 160 usd it's a little Celeron pc with a little 7 inch touch screen embedded in the top running win 10. Runs on 12v 2a so can run off battery. Has all the usual usb HDMI lan etc. So much better deal than a raspberry pi

Many projects might take of the moment, CM4 modules are available, at least. There are tons of interesting base boards for these, as a basis for different embedded purposes, multiplied by the range of the CM4's and hopefully upcoming CM5 or compatible competitors. Fact is: many small and cheaper low-power PCs, which were fine for embedded projects, have not been available, too, and people had to adjust to new chipsets and details. But there is no common standard für GPIO, ADC/DAC and other embedded interfaces on the PC, nor Linux support in the quality of the Raspberry ecosystem. Some solutions in the Raspberry ecosystem are too expensive, like some NAS cases. So, for certain areas, a low-end passive-cooled PC like the NUC or elder HP Microservers were a way better basis at a similar price.

back in 2019, i bought a bunch of raspberry pi zeros (with and without wifi) for $5 and $10. i'm super glad i did, because that is a nice board size for just stuffing an intelligence into an ordinary object

Thanks Rob!

Hey can u do a show about Wifone if it's a good security fone ?

I have the Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB in the Vilros keyboard/touchpad hub with an 8bitdo N30 wireless mouse. I run Berryboot on it and my other two Pis. I have a Raspberry Pi 400 and a Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB that just has a copper shell and fan for portability. I got everything cheap though. I wouldn't do it today.

The recent Pis are too expensive and over-specced for what I need most of the time. I recently used NanoPi Neo because it had just the ports I needed, all the CPU I needed and it can be purchased in a nice heatsink case. And it’s a lot cheaper. The stock image for it is hopelessly out of date but there is a DietPi image available for it.

question from the start is, why you need a shortage to have your software running on other devices. There are sooo many other low energy devices you seem to overlook. Odroid or Libre Computer have similar devices with good prices.

What about the power consumption? I have some Raspberry pi's that I have been running since 2019 (24 hours a day 7 days a week) for sharing internet bandwidth etc (honey-gain and Earn-app etc)

In Italy you can find a 150€ nuc with a Celeron j4005

The whole reason for Pi existing was budget PC building and education... no longer being budget means it isn't necessary anymore. You can get better boards with better instruction sets for nearly the same price, so why bother?

The Raspberry Pi 5 IS OUT (and slowly shipping). Does your recommendation to DROP PIs get changed by that?

I like VGA out and Keyboard Computers. I really like the Orange Pi 800 and may pick one up even though they are Android 12 instead of Linux.

Your arguments are very valid. But unfortunately the Raspberry Pi and the Nuc-X are not realy compareble because the Nuc-X doesn't have a GPIO-Port and for my projects are the these ports mandatory. I had searching as well to alternatives but was not realy successful until today. If anyone can give me an advise, it would be great.

There is a FreeBSD image as well.

You could have just suggested buying old laptops for a fraction of the price. They have powerful CPUs, cost less, and relatively lower power consumption than the intel nuc, although nowhere as low as the pi

I have a 8GB pi and run a windows 11 in it. It works.

Another reason for the shortage is horders like me. I have 2x model 4B's and I got another 2x 4GB PI4B's earlier this month because I saw them in stock and I knew there was a shortage. I only use one.

i like odroid's had a lot of fun using it and reasonable price

There's a $100 portable display I like better then the laptop style display. Same size though.

im dying to know, are you recording your videos on a boat? that background looks stranglely like a boat.

so any nuc will be able to use your software

did you checkout the upcoming Raspberry Pi Model 5?

I agree. Time to move on. I think the more powerful microcontrollers (ESP32-S3 and soon to come ESP32-P4, NXP, STM32) offer more than ever before at a stupidly low price, and above that you have the ex business 1L i5 PC's on ebay sub $100. The gap has closed on RPi4 like Luke Skywalker in the Death Star Garbage Disposal Unit.

Thanks! 73... VE2FET ps still better than doing assembler and using a KIM with 6502 (and 4K of RAM).. ;-)

I've been watching the supply of Pi's slowly improve lately. They are making about 600,000-1,000,000 per month and the availability is only slowly improving because the demand is so high. There are several recent interviews where they go through the numbers and the situation. It's great to have options, and the Pi's will be more available as we go forward. We'll probably even see a Pi 5 at some point that should be interesting. For some things the alternatives are fine, for others the superior support of the Pi has value. It's good to have choices.

I've given up on the RPi , I have a Pi 4b with 2 G.B. that I use for my field ham radio, and also a zero w for a dedicated Hamclock. I wanted to build a second field radio with RPi but I've nixed the whole idea. I blame scalpers .greed. Raspberry had a good thing for awhile and their heart was in the right place. But i think that they toast

Have you used, have experience with beaglebone?