this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Yeah, it's impossible to get a pi4 now for msrp. Maybe they should work out their production issues before launching a new device.
Kind of frustrating that little boards are still hard to get.
To be frank at this point. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a well-established brand name and decent communities Etc. But that doesn't make up for a lot of the faults. The closed video system with binary blogs and unavailable specifications or availability of copper open source drivers. Leading to wildly different performance from distribution to distribution simply based on who managed to a corporate they proprietary drivers into their distribution. And now the open flirtation with major commercial players as embedded compute units. Making them largely unavailable to the group they were designed for.
I might still get a Raspberry Pi 5. But only the one. All previous generations I had bought two or more of them for various uses. But I was seriously looking at things like the lechee pie4 recently. I think ultimately for the future the way to go is going to be the riscv system. The ISA has been around for roughly a decade at this point though only in the last few years has actual Hardware been getting mass produced and at first it couldn't really approach even Raspberry Pi levels of performance. The ones coming out right now easily can. And it's only going to get better with the rapid adoption and development of it.
If the foundation does not focus back on the educational and obvious markets. They are going to lose it. And that may be okay for them. With their other commercial Partners they've been selling to over recent years they seem to favor them more anyways.
Chances are pi 4 availability will be back after this. Since everyone will be wanting to buy the new one.
By that logic the pi3 should be readily available.
They've generally not been that scarce or unaffordable when I've seen them. But I haven't purposely gone out looking for them. Haven't really needed to look for them. I still have my original pi's 1,2,3,and 4s all in working order. But even the back in the depths of 2020-2021 and 2022 when Raspberry Pi 4's were almost impossible to come by. I would still regularly see two and three's for sale.
I was trying to acquire Pis from 2020-2022, and I was on every waiting list from every supplier, and if I was even 10 minutes late after getting the in stock email, they'd be out of stock. I had to wait like 9 months for digikey to fill my 3b+ order in 2022.
The only way I could get one was to buy them from scalpers.
We were lucky enough to have a MicroCenter in the area so that probably definitely helped a little bit.
But all of that is part of the reason why I'm actually more excited for some of the new risk V Systems coming out. I think they are probably going to end up filling in what the pi used to be. But only time will tell. We still have yet to see how open the device trees and full driver support will be. But the idea of being able to get one and just slap any binary compatible version of Linux on there and not having to track down the proprietary drivers is a very desirable outcome.
There are dozens of SBCs out there now that are as good, if not better than pis and are actually available. I've never heard of or had to install proprietary drivers on any of them.