Raspberry Pi becomes a public company

Well, so much for that I guess
- Yeah its really too bad. I used to love the company but now I just don't see them making things for hobbies. Anyone know of some good alternatives? Ive heard good things about lepotato?
  
  They were never about hobbies. We were a niche that they were happy to have, but they never cared. Origionally it was about education (which has a large overlap with hobbies so they served well).
  
  OrangePI
  
  Arduinos all the way down I guess
  
  Lattepanda mu is apparently a very powerful alternative.
  
  Radxa for RISC-V SBCs with GPIO.
  
  I have been using Odroid boards for many years. I currently have 3 C4 boards and 1 older C1 board. My kids use them as their computer in their rooms. Hardkernel is the company behind the boards, they also provided the official Home assistant blue devices that came pre installed with HASS.
  
  The only downside I see with LePotato is that it has no SteamLink client (for now). Otherwise, there are plenty of OSes made for it. I have one SD card for CoreELEC to watch things on the TV, and one with Batocera for game emulators.
  
  I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it's a start I guess.
  
  Orange or banana pi
  
  Any N300 based PC is under $200, tiny, low watts, faster than a Pi5, and can run any distro because it's a regular PC.
  
  I'm using a lepotato for Home Assistant. Works very well for months now, but I'm a bit worried about long term distro support
  
  The pandemic shortage marked the end of the RPi as a hobbyist board. All the stock when to companies, and every hobbyist shop jacked the prices, and scalpers even more.
  
  Do arduino stuff or look up chips with those cortexm0 arm processors. Like these: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3403
- I honestly never thought I’d see this day. It’s like announcing Linux just went closed source!

A moment of silence for the company that once connected hobbyists with affordable hardware. It was never perfect, but the profound impact on makers and industry is undeniable.
I will remember you for what you once were, not what you came to be.

Garbage. They started this in order to provide very poor people the means to program and create things.

It was a fun run.
I hope someone else comes up with a similar product soon.
- Similar products exist, but I don’t think any of the others have quite the same level of official and community documentation.
  
  I haven't looked into it in years but Arduino used to be pretty similar.
- I’m pretty sure there are a lot of similar boards out there
  
  OrangePi comes to mind.
  
  Banana Pis are great
  
  There are, and I think the only real difference has been the community support. The community was behind the original pi and the guides, images and support show that, and it continues to this day.
  If this becomes "enshittified" then communities will grow around the alternatives, it's likely there will be an overall winner (or winners per class) and we'll move on. The device itself wasn't ever the whole story.
  
  if I made a k8s cluster with all the options I could have a fruit salad
- There are a ton already. RPi stopped being interesting 5 years ago.
  
  I really liked my RP 4.
- Not the same form factor and around twice the price, erying es intel motherboards are a steal at their current price. You do need RAM / Storage / ATX PSU they end up a much more performant' piece of hardware.
  The Q1J2 (20 threads) board I have despite it being an ES chip has given me no issues. Running most of my home services on the board with a coral nvme m.2 + nvme + sata storage. Can even do dual ethernet via the a+e m.2 and add-in more sata storage via m.2 to 6x sata board.
  I've got a pi somewhere in the mounds of boards at home, but would rather spin up another container / pod / nspawn on my erying board vs go through the motions of setting up a pi.
  
  I've been debating an X86 for all my favourite old school games.
- I think a bunch of others gained some footing in the market when Raspberry Pi had supply chain issues during/after COVID. When I last shopped for a Pi, I saw a ton of other options.

2024 is going to be the year of ~~the Linux Desktop~~ enshittification. When anything you love goes public, you won't be loving it for much longer.
- And thus begins "why isn't the profit line going up?" phase of the company
  
  At faster growth rates each quarter!
- Nope, it has been ongoing since 2013. From Adobe stopping physical sales of Creative Suite, to the Xbox One being announced, to Apple flattening iOS to the point of it looking like ass, the enshittification has started at this point in time. And their excuse was to be "more modern", my ass.
  
  eh, i actually like flat design. just me, though.

Begun, the Clone Wars have.
- Well, they've been going on for a couple of years now, Master Jedi
- Pi Picos (which are notably microcontrollers and not computers) have had clones for like $2 on Aliexpress for some time now, and devices like the Orange Pi and similar have existed for years.

- The new ones are power hungry expensive monsters anyway. There are cheaper clones out there and I had pretty much decided never to pay for the gucci brand anymore.
  
  I’ve had lots of fun with the very affordable Pi Zero 2w. Will pick up a few more before they disappear.

Remember today when you reflect on what was stolen from us.
- I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

Friendship ended with raspberry pi Now Pine 64 is my new best friend
- Rockchip processors is where it's at these days. Every pi alternative runs an RK3566 or RK3568
  For true open source it's gotta be RISCV instead of ARM. Bbut it might be too early days for that.
  
  Yeah I mean Pine64 produces RISCV boards
  
  The RK3588 is pretty nifty, and is the first Mali GPU (610) where ARM themselves have contributed the firmware upstream and have helped with Collabora with Panfrost development
  Bleeding edge, still, but kernel 6.10 and Mesa 24.1 have GPU support
  HDMI TX and DSI/CSI are still in-progress
- Yes(ish) They are not yet as powerful as RPi. But if you have a low power usecase then yes.
  
  Broadly yes, as a "user".
- Anyone used Beagleboards?

So that settles it. I have to get one now before they enshittify the new models.
- The 5 is already somewhat enshittified. The Non Standard USB power that makes you buy a propietary PS is one example (which I found out after buying one for my son).
  
  Ew
  
  That is due to power reasons ,but they could have just underclocked it by default.
- Bu- bu- but... it's got AI.
  
  People were asking for ML/AI accelerator to replace Coral for a very long time.

The end of a beautiful era - hats off for all the folks who made the pi what it is, the folks who will now be forced to make us sorrowful for what it will become.

I'm glad they came out as what they already were.
It was clear that they did not feel as a non-profit foundation for many years now.
- One is a tax shelter for the other got it.
- For months it was impossible for me to get any Pis at MSRP and then my employer suddenly bought 30 of them to use for signage around the office. That's when I knew the non-profit hobbyist/enthusiast org was gone.
  I'm not worried about it though. In the meantime a lot of other stellar SBCs have emerged on the market.
  
  Which would you recommend any as the best Pi replacement?
  
  You couldn't buy anything in retail because of scalpers. British shops decided to stop scalpers, so would only sell to existing customers who bought Pis before shortages. So, for example, I had no issues getting 3 more Pis. But if you would make a brand new account you'd see them out of stock permanently. This system worked like a charm! But they should've done it earlier.

This hurts.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

F
Time comes for us all.

They've already gone downhill since 2020 when they couldn't keep up with the demand and focused on B2B sales. This really isn't a surprise to me
- I thought they started from the idea of creating an affordable device mostly for people that need and can't afford a proper computer... I guess money gave them amnesia
  
  They did, and they still have the rpi foundation with that goal, as well as the for-profit subsidiary.
  It's a flaw with effective altriusm-- you have a goal of fixing some large scale problem and at some point you realize you need large amounts of capital to expand your impact. But the interim period you are just going to be amassing wealth with this idea of doing good. And even then, you may never reach a point where you feel like you earned enough to solve your problem. I.e sam bankman fried
  Now I'm not saying that rpi foundation hasn't done good in the world. I'm just saying that they did start off with a lofty goal and it is clear that they are wanting to expand and make more money. Maybe this means someday they'll be able to do even greater things through the rpi foundation.... but I'm not optimistic
  
  I mean, the market did what the market does.
  They released a device with the intent of being a tinker kit for programming and interacting with the physical world. The next technological jump for hobbyists from PIC to Arduino, became an ARM SBC.
  Of course, they released a cheap ARM SBC, and industry quickly learned that these are great for rapid prototyping and any case that called for a small low-power Linux system.
  I wouldn't say they lost their way. There's still a great hobbyists market around it, and tons of good competition. I'd say it's more like they are a victim of their own success.

That explains the Pi 5 pricing. They started the enshittification early.
- exactly what i thought. lol.

Ew.

Shit. I guess my or anyone else's loyalty hasn't mattered. I've bought two competing products during the drought and now we are going to have maximum suckage from them since the investors will be driving the bus now. How long before they intentionally hold back functionality and hide it behind some bullshit subscription?
- Outside of a few small local businesses that actually care about doing right by people, loyalty hasn't mattered for decades dude. Companies don't give a shit about any of us. Why even bother thinking in terms of loyalty, it's completely misaligned with how they operate.

So on an unrelated note, what's the best alternative available right now?
- Radxa
  
  They have a great line up. So Milk-V duo is cool but really a lower class lower prive device
- Maybe Orange PI.
- Honestly... when I was doing my research, for the power consumption and the flexibility of Raspberry Pi, nothing came close to it, at least not at the time (2016). Since then, I've never even bothered to look at it's competition.

Well, shit.

pis have gotten less exciting over the years.
for those who are purely using the compute side of the pi is not as interesting anymore due to the flood of both 3rd party options, as well as used dirt cheap micro pcs (e.g Optiplex 9020 micros, 7040 micros, thinkcentre 710q)
and for those who program , they have to split based on usecase. for pure robotics and less compute, there isnt much of a reason to use a pi over an arduino. for IoT, using ESP32 are more useful for device to device communication, so pis sat in this weird spot where you needed it for basic compute (e.g. some object detection) or you needed the community behind pi. but since pis are being bought out by corpo, doong hobby work on a pi is too expensive nowadays. to me, pis died after their pricing tiers for memory not really being great (2019)
- Yeah. Drop over $100 for a high end Pi or get a old refurbished slim pc for same with more compute/ram, VESA mountable, x64 vs ARM and more expandable...

Booooooooooo!!!!! Boo I say!
I SAY BOO!!!

Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters

Loved the Pi for hosting small services around the house. I've just replaced my Pi4 with a N100, 16GB, 512GB SSD mini pc which is so much faster, not to mention cheaper than a Pi5.
- Can you compare power consumption to the Pi 4? Just an estimate, double, tripple,..
  
  I have a dell wyse 5070 with a j4105 cpu that runs home assistant with frigate and z2m around 3-5W with a bluetooth and zigbee stick attached. If more processing is needed it will boost to 15w for example during docker container updates, but it will also perform much better in these situations than the PI does. It costed me ~85€ from a refurbish shop and even had 1 year warranty. It came with 4gb ram, 128gb ssd, power supply and case ofc. It was a no brainer at the time when just the PI4 alone was like 80€ for 4 gb ram version if you could find it in stock. And that didn't include case, power supply or sd card.
  
  Not sure what a pi4 uses, but my NUC (16gb ram, 1tb NVME, quad core i3 up to 2.4ghz) running my smart home (HA in a VM) and a few other small services in LXCs uses ~7W on average. Loads more compute power if I need it at half the price. Even if a pi4 draws half the power, that's only $8 saving per year.

Guess I should stock up while I can huh?
I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.
But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.
We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…

RIP

So much for them remaining cheap...

It was some kind of non-profit previously right? What happens with the money paid for the shares they floated?
- I think they’re playing the same game OpenAI is. Nonprofits can “own” for-profits.
  No, it’s not rational or ethical or reasonable, but it’s a thing, because Capitalism gotta Capitalism.
  
  Nonprofits can “own” for-profits.
  One of the saner reasons for this structure is that the non-profit owns the things the for-profit works on. If the for-profit goes under, all things are still owned by the non-profit, so some large tech company can't swoop in and yoink anything available.
  This includes any and all data generated by the for-profit, which means your data is "safe".
- There are two separate entities: the raspberry pi foundation which is the charity and unchanged, and the raspberries pi holdings company which has always been the business side of the project. The corporation contributes to the foundation a significant amount of money which is not changing. The charity is the majority stakeholder in the company.
  Here's the founder explaining it
  https://youtu.be/EoSPR_dZnYg?feature=shared
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/EoSPR_dZnYg?feature=shared
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Well I guess the lack of availability that never let me get into pi's the last few years was a good thing. R.I.P.

Whats events point of going public? Arent they making profit? Or what does it even do for then now?
- Their goal shifts from making cool hardware to... money, make money at all costs to appease the shareholder devils.
- In general the reasons could be, an opportunity to raise capital meaning they can ramp up production or produce a better product, and/or the current owners want to cash out.
  
  Most of the time is for the owner to cash out. Either now, or in a short time when the ramp up is done, for more money.
- More money.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Introduced in 2014, the Pi gained the familiar 40-pin GPIO header and 512MB of RAM, yet it can hardly be called a ball of fire when compared to more modern hardware from the company.
Pi supremo Eben Upton was delighted with how things have gone so far and said in a statement: "The reaction that we have received is a reflection of the world-class team that we have assembled and the strength of the loyal community with whom we have grown.
"Welcoming new shareholders alongside our existing ones brings with it a great responsibility, and one that we accept willingly, as we continue on our mission to make high-performance, low-cost computing accessible to everyone."
Some users have expressed mixed feelings about the IPO, noting that the money would be helpful for R&D and new projects, however, the flotation underlines the fact that the company is a business.
As for the future, Upton told The Register earlier this year that while he remains at the helm of the organization, it would continue to do interesting work and try to keep making money.
The Reg hopes this is the case, but think it's fair to say that pleasing both the corporation's customers and shareholders might end up being more challenging than obtaining a Raspberry Pi 5 at launch.
The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Well, what we need is some dedicated non-profit company making chips.

I'm guessing this means new pi versions soon.
- RPi6 XL Plus - ad free
  
  $4.99/month. It's essentially just a cup of coffee!

Now I'm glad I didn't get plugged in to their ecosystem.

Lame

The 3B was a far superior alternative to the NES Classic I couldn't get at the time (and taught me what little I know about Linux - I even got a lesson in sudo one time when a command wouldn't work). o7

Oh shit I missed one of these again.

e_e

Public? Like, owned by a state? Isn't that good?
- No, publicly traded. One of the first steps to enshittyfication.
  
  Often a whole lot of steps are taken before actually going public.
- I think in English that'd be called being nationalized
  
  Oooh, gotcha! I didn't understand many of the replies because I'm not well versed in economics, but I thought that it meant nationalized indeed.
- Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn't make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.
  For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.
- No, public like owned by investors who bought stock and want profits.
- Listed on stock exchanges instead of owned by private shareholders.
- Owned by everyone who wants to buy them. Yes, it is good.