• daggermoon@piefed.world
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    4 hours ago

    I bought a Dell Optiplex at Goodwill for $20 that could probably run circles around that thing.

          • daggermoon@piefed.world
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            3 hours ago

            Yes. I upgraded the CPU to an i7-4790 and I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB. I also got some pcie sata cards and added a bunch of HDD’s. The HDD’s are mostly lower capacity ones I had laying around but it’s cool. I installed Cachy OS on it and even got Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen running on it. I don’t have room for a dedicated GPU so modern games are out of the question. It was a fun project.

  • blackshirt@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I switched to ESP32 chips for my hobbies and then the damn Europeans imposed tariffs on AliExpress &co and now even those cost double now.

    • nothrone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      Seriously, these EU tariffs on imported goods piss me off so fucking much. I like some EU things (GDPR, etc), but then they also make decisions that are so fucking bad. We were already paying VAT. The new taxes basically kill hobbies for me. It is just a pro drop-shipping business BS by business majors tax.

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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        4 hours ago

        I agree that the cost increase is a bad thing, but something had to be done in general. Huge masses of wrongly declared packets (to save on import taxes) were flooding the EU market, disrupting local business. To prevent what happened with the german solar panel industry, which was gutted by chinese cheap manufacturing and non-existing help from the government, there had to be measures taken.

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    Wtf who would pay that much for a fuckin raspberry poo

    The entire point of raspberry pi is that they’re like $15 bucks for a bunch of cheap components. That’s why in every picture there’s no housing or anything. It’s just a $0.10 pcb and a few dollars here and there of components from the same mass produced factory that’s still producing the same usb ports and microcontrollers from old motherboards in 1999

    Are you sure $385 isn’t for like two hundred of them? For like students?

    • offspec@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      With FEX and 16GB of ram you can probably play low power PC games without much issue now, it’s just a computer

      • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 hours ago

        It seems really antithetical to the whole point of raspberry pi. Like a lowered/slammed truck that can’t carry anything, or a bicycle with 100 training wheels and a gas motor.

        It’s like they’ve lost the plot.

        It would be one thing if it was done by a user for fun, or otherwise was the exception to the rule. But having a $400 raspberry pi is ridiculous.

        • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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          2 hours ago

          You’re not wrong but…

          A whole x86 SoC for reading a dial and controlling some RGB LEDs and a dot matrix display is ridiculous. Microcontrollers are IFAIK still as cheap as ever.

  • amenotef@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I wanted to get one of these for a server…

    Ended up getting an N100 Chinese mini PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, just ready to go… it consumes…3.6W - 4.1W on idle running Ubuntu Server. I’m 100% satisfied.

    Still I had to pay like 260€ these mini PC were a lot cheaper before.

  • Carl@anarchist.nexus
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    10 hours ago

    I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
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      5 hours ago

      I’m currently building a passively cooled laptop Ryzen server with 32gb DDR4 RAM for less money. It is, like, TEN TIMES more powerful, and draws maybe 3x of Pi power consumption in peak loads, and is just as quiet and out of the way. Oh, and 1tb SSD is included in price calculations.

      Times make us get creative with the tools we have.

    • freebee@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      Pi also wins in size, if space really is limited. But yes you’re right, in many use cases an old normal computer makes more sense. Bit fewer e-trash also…

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      I have a stack of these and Lenovo tinys in a drawer ranging from 8 to 2 years old. Just no time or ideas what to do with them all

    • ramble81@lemmy.zip
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      8 hours ago

      Okay that’s good to know. Honestly I always considered a Pi a single use, light weight device that just happens to run common ARM64. When they went for 8/16GB of RAM it felt like they were trying to turn them into mini general purpose computers.

      • KatherinaReichelt@feddit.org
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        7 hours ago

        And they do work like great general purpose computers. They have no moving parts, no fan and linux. So they are robust as fuck. Get the one that is coming in its own keyboard and you have everything you need.

  • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    I don’t get how they can justify this. I can get a proper mini PC with 16GB RAM and an 500GB NVME SSD for less than that.

    • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip
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      9 hours ago

      The parts SBCs use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded applications.

      • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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        8 hours ago

        use have been hit the hardest in terms of price increases. And mini PCs aren’t a good replacement for the Pi in embedded

        I mean, yeah I’m aware that LPDDR SDRAM chips are in short supply as a lot of the capacity was shifted for other types of SDRAM, but is it enough to allow for an entire SSD to be included at the same price? Its not like flash prices haven’t also increased a ton.

        I was also thinking that there are cooling systems (fans are expensive!), cases, etc. that add costs to mini PCs that mean they really shouldn’t compete with SBC in price.

        • pelya@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          Just wait for a few months for an existing stock of prebuilt PCs to run out, and you’ll see their price jump even higher.

          Cheap Chinese Pi knockoffs like OrangePi are also becoming more expensive, it’s because the cost of the components increases. AI companies now buying all RAM and every RAM, even ancient DDR3.

          • ferret@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            I doubt AI companies are buying DDR3, it’s just second-order effects of new hardware being unobtainium.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 hours ago

    I thought the Pi 5 was too expensive when it came out. This is just ridiculous. For most uses, a used PC, phone or tablet would be a much better choice. The only Pi I would even consider using is the Zero 2W, but they’ve been out of stock all year.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      That’s kind of expensive, I bought mine for around 25-35€… (Only one with a case).

      Now, my thinkcentre usff, they sometimes cost 40 to 80€…

      300+? Madness.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    9 hours ago

    So what I’m gathering is I should set aside my wife’s broken pixel phone to use as a low power server.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours ago

      I mean generally, how much computational power is lying around in discarded smart phones?

      How much I reached potential is there in some sort of clustering solution to distribute the load such that 2-6 smartphones can get some real work done?

        • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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          7 hours ago

          It’s a bit trickier than that. They won’t run from USB power alone. The battery has to be replaced with a battery eliminator circuit.

          If the phone is new enough, it may have an option to prevent the battery from fully charging. If it does, you can enable that and leave the battery in until it’s completely worn out. That way you have a built in UPS.

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf
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    10 hours ago

    Thanks, Sam, ‘I want to take your computers away and make you rent from the cloud,’ Altman.

  • TheImpressiveX@lemmy.today
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    10 hours ago

    At that price, you might as well buy an Intel NUC Mini PC. You’d get more performance at a similar price, and it’s x86 instead of ARM.