It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
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Sooner or later capitalism ruins everything.
Then it’s a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy.
We need regulation on corporations to keep them in check.
The fact that regulations make capitalism less dangerous doesn’t mean that capitalism is fine as long as its regulated.
Hand grenades have a tonne of safety features, but you wouldn’t let your kid play with one. “Safer” isn’t the same thing as “safe”.
What would you propose as being better than the mix of capitalism and socialism that almost every country already has for their economy?
Both extremes lead to terrible outcomes.
Has any country actually TRIED anarchy? I know it sounds terrible on paper, but like…could it possibly be any worse then whatever the fuck north korea is doing? The dictator and his dogs eat very well. Nice beef meals. Whereas the citizens are more like prisoners within a country. Most never even seeing beef because it’s too expensive.
Would their lives actually be any worse off if there was just no government, no police, no military, no rules, just everybody for themselves?
Because it kind of seems like they got nothing to lose. It be an amazing case study.
There was the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. It’s not a whole country going anarchist and no doubt the limited amount of people with the nessisary skill sets to have a functioning society (judging from the food garden they set up) held back the viability of the protest, but in general the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest was widly seen as a wild failure.
It’s an interesting thing to look up on, and I’d definitely recommend anyone who is serious about anarchism to study it for the potential pit falls of an anarchist society that they would need to work out first.
“Listen, we already watered down our deadly poison a little and it’s still killing us. Unless you have a better idea we’ll just have to keep drinking deadly poison.”
I’d let my kid play with a grenade. Then again, I don’t have kids by choice, so to imply I had kids would be to imply that at some point something went terribly wrong. But rectified in the most absurd method possible.
Plus, you couldn’t go to jail for child abuse, because what parent is “double checking” that the grenade he’s playing with is in fact a toy? BECAUSE WHERE THE HELL DOES THIS 3 YEAR OLD GET A GRENADE???
That logic would track in court. A very sad, very bizzare set of circumstances. That theres no way you could blame the parent for.
And so begins “Line must go up” and the inevitable enshittification .
I’m willing to bet they’ll start adding telemetry features in RPiOS for “quality purposes” a few years from now.
They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.
Isn’t the GPU documented now?
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545
There are reverse engineered docs as well: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv
Yeah, expect nothing more than enshitification. That way, if they don’t enshitify like every company does, then we’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The nice thing about being a pessimist is that you are always either right, or pleasantly surprised.
Not with my luck
That’s the spirit!
The shit winds are coming, Randy
Let the enshitification begin!
The Pi5 is already a shitshow with crazy power usage requiring a special power supply instead of a normal USB C phone charger.
We’re lucky that the SBC space has gotten really solid over the last couple years. ARM-based, X86-based, and even some RISC-V systems.
The PI isn’t the only only game in town now, and actually gets beat in several different applications depending on use case.
As shareholder value and line-must-go-up takes over the company culture, progress and innovation will happen more and more in the hands of companies and orgs that actually care about their product’s quality and features.
Still disappointing though, the Pi was my first introduction to IoT and low power computing.
Yeah I’d take a 3b-ish PI for say 30€ any day (IDK if that’s realistic pricing). If I need beefy hardware I just use a PC?
The Pi4 had a good price on release. Then Covid hit.
With the Pi5 the Pi foundation is just milking it. Overpriced chip on an inefficient outdated 28nm process node.
Tech companies as soon as they are publicly traded:
They’ve crossed the event horizon of enshitification.
I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs
but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it’s a soulless corporate husk of what it one was
I had never heard of radxa. Looks awesome!
Orange PI comes to mind, getting better over time too.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.
Mostly that IPOs put companies into ‘infinite growth mode’ which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can’t just do ‘good enough’ anymore.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they’ll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they’re reporting to shareholders?
Big pharma companies jack up the prices of life saving medicine that’s been affordable for decades and don’t lose a bit of sleep. You bet your ass a hobby electronics company will jack up prices as far as they think they can.
Price is one thing but the push for returns on investments is massive, this means that it’s time to start cutting corners on everything (except maybe marketing! Yea!). Quality, repairability, and innovation all start to crumble.
Don’t call Raspberry a hobbyist electronics company. Their primary consumer has been business and enterprise customers for years now, industrial/controls companies jumped all over the pi as a super easy drop-in board that can be programmed by any code monkey.
The Pi hardware shortage of the last few years has mostly been because of this demand, with Raspberry openly saying they were prioritizing bulk corporate orders foe their production volume over hobby consumers. Fuck the little guy, Pi is dead.
Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.
It doesn’t always end this way but often enough to worry about it…
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we’ve basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.
Oh jees… welp it was great while it lasted.
Got my last Pi (RBP5) to try to set up a simple TV player under linux… unfortunately the performance was shit… had to go with Android and it’s barely OK (bang for buck)
With the IPO I expect RBP are going to become more expensive and significantly enshitified… so that’s that
? RPi5 is something like 2x faster than RPi4. Are you using some format that RPi doesn’t accelerate? Or are you running something heavy?
I almost picked up an RPi5 to replace my NAS, but the SATA hat was out of stock so I just did a smaller upgrade with stuff laying around my house (Phenom II x4 -> Ryzen 1700, mostly for power savings).
Pi5 doesn’t have h264 hardware. Pi4 is probably better for media centers right now.
That’s encoding, right? It seems to have 4k60 HEVC decoding, which should be plenty for a media center.
That assumes your media collection is all hevc. That’s not the case for most people.
It only needs to be HEVC for 4k content, 1080p works fine in pretty much any format. Most people probably have mostly 1080p or 720p content.
Yes, that’s my point. If you have a library full of 1080 h264 then the pi 4 is a better choice. The Pi5 will struggle with software decoding compared to the 4.
At the end of the day, they’re different boards with different use cases. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate that enough.
What software do you run for that, and is there support for a remote control?
For a standard media center, kodi is pretty great.
I was planning to use it to drive one of my TVs, so basically to be an HDTV player.
The Raspbian OS was fine, the Emby client would not start and the performance on the web client was not great.
Ah, okay. I’m not familiar with Emby, I’ve mostly only used Kodi on my RPi4. I’m guessing there’s a way to get reasonable performance, but you may need to transcode.
What software were you running?
I was planning to use it to drive one of my TVs, so basically to be an HDTV player.
The Raspbian OS was fine, the Emby client would not start (segmentation fault) and the performance on the web client was not great.
Now on Android, Emby client runs pretty well (better than on the FireTV sticks I am trying to replace) but I could not get Google Play working (yet) which left me without F1TV (the only “other” vid app I care about for now to run on the TV)
Shit. Need to grab a couple spare Pis now while they’re still good.
So what do we use now that Raspi has gone to shit?
Here’s to hoping a solid sbc with gpio pins and solid software support shows up as a competitor to keep them in check?
:(
