Fuck em. They launched using hobbyists then just pivoted completely to commercial markets while calling themselves an education charity. $100 mini PC does more now, and you don’t have to buy $50 of dongles
I miss when they were $35 although I’m happy for their success. I’ve been following their journey for a long time.
I am not so sure since they are a for profit company now…
I wonder if there are any completely FOSS and non-profit SBC organizations / hardware. Maybe something with a RISC-V chip. Seems like there’s more than enough interest. With some research it looks like there’s the beaglebone but isn’t blob free and the olimex but they are a for-profit.
Price went up along with the hardware power though. RPi 1 had 700 Mhz and 512 MB of ram, versus rpi5 at 2.4 Ghz quad core modern arm, 800 MHz GPU, and from 1 to 16 GB of ram lol.
It went from “oh cool I can run a small web server easy! A full Linux computer can fit in my pocket and I can bring it anywhere!” to basically gaming laptop specs of that early era.
You can basically get a pi zero 2w for less today than the rpi 1, and it’s smaller and more powerful than the rpi1. I would say the price is damn reasonable.
And the microcontroller options these days… You can get a TON for cheap.
I bought an rpi 3 for $35, the exact same board is now selling for around $50+ I think that’s more so what I’m comparing. Typically old hardware decreases in price over a decade, not increase.
