The world's gone mad!

There are some RPi "clones" out there still going for less, and some of them are actually available to buy. I have not tried any of them, but some of the Libre boards are still listing for US$30 or so, and I think the Orange Pis are also still cheaper (and may have a little more horse power).

• SLMR 2.1a * Veni, Vidi, Velcro. (I came, I saw, I stuck around)

With a desktop, you don't have the refinements around power consumption so it'll potentially cost more in electricity long-term than an over-priced Pi4 if it's on all the time. That might apply to a lesser degree with most laptops too, and those might also suffer from over-heating problems.

So for an always-on home application, I can see why someone would prefer a Pi4 to a regular PC even at that price. However once you're in that price range there are a lot of other SBCs to choose from as well, so it might still be mad to pay that much.

On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 20:44:07 -0000 (UTC), Andrew Smallshaw snipped-for-privacy@sdf.org declaimed the following:

And that is limited to just digital I/O compared to a BeagleBone Black running a Debian release (the BBB has two sets of I/O pins, supports true analog input and PWM outputs, and two programmable realtime units [PRUs, meant for developing I/O protocols without impacting main processor]). The BeagleBone AI has onboard DSP, twice the PRUs, and same form factor as the BBB. Oh, and they have onboard flash memory so one /can/ run without using an SD card.

Also, if you have a bit of patience, you can still buy a Raspberry Pi without lining the pockets of the scalpers. You need to act quickly when they pop up here: