Although the old 4s are now like $50. I remember when those were selling at stupidly inflated prices.
An old 3 or 4 is more than enough for my dumb little home projects.
Comment on Raspberry Pis are cheaper than Mini PCs again
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The price didn’t go down, he’s factoring in current ram prices. $250 for an rpi 5 is wild.
Although the old 4s are now like $50. I remember when those were selling at stupidly inflated prices.
An old 3 or 4 is more than enough for my dumb little home projects.
Still running PiHole on a 3B.
The Pi 4 is plenty robust for Docker and a few small things depending on how much RAM your model has etc. Mine runs Immich well, unless you give it huge videos to transcode, which crushes the CPU and takes forever.
I use a little 3b for home automation stuff. That little guy is arguably overkill for controlling a thermostat and some other silly things.
You almost certainly could do it with an ESP32 (a microcontroller with Arduino support and which supports WiFi and bluetooth).
An ESP32 Super Mini board costs about $5.
Of course, forget about an UI other than web-based for the ESP32 or proper OS (like Linux) support, as that stuff is on the embedded systems side of things (and kinda powerful for that) rather than Single Board Computer.
I’m still running Jellyfin and the arr stack on an 8GB Pi 4 just fine.
I’ve used cheaper thin clients in the past. You can get them much cheaper than $50 and they come ready to go with storage, power supply, and case.
Pshh. A case? I have a perfectly good tea bag box here.
Thin clients are good if you don’t need much storage. They usually don’t have any way to add more except for USB.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Probably because $250 is wildy misleading. This is an all inclusive kit which includes case, heat sinks, fan, micro-hdmi cables, power supply and you have to go for the 16gb rpi 5 to reach $230. All the things I want to do with a Pi I would really only need 4gb of RAM max, which the kit is $140.
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The 16gb rpi 5 on its own with no extras is $145 and the 4gb on its own with no extras is $70.
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Sure that’s still a lot more than the original goal of $35 computing but you can still get a basic kit for the rpi Zero 2 W for $40
Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Ok, well $145 for a rpi 5 is wild.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Pepperridge farm remembers when a Raspi was $25.
titanicx@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Fuck. 25 to 50 for a pi is like the most that should be.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
They’re out of stock at both Canakit and Vilros, but an original Pi Zero is still just $10 for the board.
Sure, that’s well beyond the inflation rate, but remember these are licensed resellers of official Pi products, so they have to mark them up at least a little to make a profit, especially now with tariffs affecting the imports.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I’ve kinda come to expect in the last three decades I’ve been following this stuff that hardware has the tendency to both get better and cheaper as time goes on.
Like, RAM isn’t really expensive at all right now either if you think selling an 8GB stick of DDR4 for $160 today fine, as that is also 10 year old hardware at double the launch price.
So it’s not that I expect being able to buy an old Raspi model for $25 or $5, I expect to be able to the buy a newer without having to pay up to six times as much.
bluGill@fedia.io 4 days ago
The price of a mini pc includes the price of the case, power supply, heat sinks, fans and such. The hdmi is the only thing suspect but if the case doesn't expose the hdmi port that will be in the minipc as well. when you compare just the board of a pi to a full pc that is unfair.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I didn’t compare the board to the full price of a mini PC, I was giving the information for context.
Further the raw power of a Pi 5 with 16gb of RAM is genuinely equivalent to a lot of thin client desktops with a lot more extensibility. I think you’re getting what you pay for, honestly.
I’m not going to say they shouldn’t be a little cheaper, but the Pi 5 is kind of a powerhouse compared to older Pis and you have to push for the 16gb of RAM version to make it actually expensive.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
4 GB is not enough for web browsing
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Funny enough I recently bought an N100 Mini-PC with 8GB (as a Christmas present to replace somebody’s aged Windows 8 PC) for just a bit over $140 (more precisely €123, so $143 at today’s exchange rate).
According to this the performance of the microprocessor on the Pi5 is at the same level as that of the N100.
So basically if you buy a Mini PC with an N100 and 8GB memory you can roughly get the performance of the Pi5 at the price of a Pi4 with 4GB.
lauha@lemmy.world 3 days ago
35 dollars in 2012 is 49 dollars now whenntaking inflation into account. You can get Pi 5 1GB model for 45 usd.