Good Bye Raspberry Pi

Many years ago, when Raspberry Pi appeared, I was kind of excited, but was busy with kids and other things. But I was reasonably excited about a really affordable and stable platform for projects.

Some years later, I was visiting an acquaintance who had one sitting in a pile of junk. Noticing my interest he said, with a slight tinge of disgust, "Take it! I don't want it". I was surprised, but he insisted that it was a piece of junk. And it was - too slow for anything useful, too complicated to use as a simple microcontroller.

And as I found out for myself, too insecure for anything I would want to be a secret (because a closed-sourced binary GPU blob boots the system). Uses too much power. No WiFi (in the older ones). No hard disk (again, older ones). No way to control the gamma. And even today, way too slow to use as my main (or even secondary) machine.

But kind of fun, for $35.

Not worth $200.

What does it mean when a product with MSRP of $35 is sold for hundreds of dollars? Not just a blip – it's been months of this. Did speculators corner the market? Is inflation out of control? Is there a real chip shortage? Is the economy collapsing? Did we finally piss off China? All of the above, I suppose. [Must... not... rant... about the economy!]

Anyway, at this price one would be a fool to buy a Raspberry Pi, when you can pick up a used i7 box with 16GB of RAM and a sizeable SSD for just a little more. Or an ESP-32 which is still under $10.

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