Windows-10/11 on a Raspberry Pi

Look up "BeeLink" on Amazon ...

SOME, the lower end - which is about one or two steps above a Pi4 - are quite affordable.

The "credit-card" profile of the PIs has always been a big plus. The (relatively) low power required has also been a plus. The low(er) PRICE has always been a plus. As I said, they fill a *niche* quite nicely.

But their AMBITIONS seem to aim towards leaving that safe and useful niche ...... and it'll kill them.

But not :

Can't buy rPi 1s anymore. There are a few 2s still out there, but for how long ? Those ARE useful - retooled one into good service last week. JUST strong enough.

The good bit is that they've managed to keep updated OSs that'll still run on the old units - I know, I have a Pi-1b, the kind with fewer GPIO pins, that's still been doing its ONE simple thing for a LONG time. Still ran on basically the original Raspbian. Recently updated to Bullseye - and it all still worked. Should be good for another decade. Not actively networked so 'security' is not a prob. Amazed the SD card worked for basically a decade though ....

(now use Samsung 'Endurance' SD cards ... and I think they've just come out with something that'll allegedly survive two or three times as many cycles)

I love "long-term support" - be it hardware or software. If I'm gonna DO something complicated I want it to LAST.

Built a bunch of embedded devices on 'Rabbits' and the company *assured* they'd still make that model for a decade. They lied. The "New and Better" had wiring SO small mere humans couldn't DEAL. Now my previous embedded device was based on an 8051 clone with a 'battery' of some kind in the fat case to keep NV RAM alive. THEY kept selling THOSE for a good decade ... even kept using a rec I'd mailed them. Had a good 'BASIC' compiler too. Amazing what you can do with 32kb if you have a good tight compiler ...

...

We had a resurrected Maker Faire near me last month after a few-year hiatus. The Raspberry Pi guys had a booth and were happy to discuss the RPi-5 product... and to give away mousepads.

I asked about their plans for product evolution. They said they were planning to continue growing performance without leaving behind existing customers -- by continuing to offer existing products.

I thought this was pretty clever. Assumes they can continue production indefinitely across the expanding line. And they can drop products at the low end (or elsewhere) if the customers tell them to.

Tom

As long as Pi can beat the price/performance targets of its competitors it will reign.

An Arduino at £20 against a PICO W PI at £7 is a no brainer.

ARM are also moving into INTEL space and given the cost of any INTEL CPU and the electricity to run it these days, they will probably win almost everywhere.

Some data centres are talking about owning their own small modular nuclear reactor...because its *cheaper* than buying electrons off the (renewable so called) grid.

Not really. If they are competitive they will win, If not, they wont.

Stop thinking in ideological terms and look to why people buy what they buy.

If someone brought out a PI that costs the same as an intel MoBo, and was inferior in performance, no one would buy it.

If they brought out a PICO that cost more than an equivalent Arduino, no one would buy it,

There is the pi zero instead.

If it works now, simply never update it. There are stil lab instruments running on MSDOS

The world is what it is. Stuff will be produced for two reasons - if it makes a profit or if the government subsidises it.

The rest of the assurances are as empty as a politician's promise.

I've just bought a B+, new, in box, for £10.00 off eBay, to test Bookworm. Only problem was to get USB WiFi dongle working. Hey-ho! Bookworm 'seems' faster than Bullseye or Buster.

I put "Motion" and a webcam on mine ... now it's an IP security cam.

Got a couple others, Pi-1s, doing other simple stuff.

Still working on the vid 'latency' issues though ... everybody wants to use big video buffers. OpenCV seems the worst - you can get 60 sec delays on rtsp feeds, and very limited ways to deal with that short of custom mod/recompile.

Anyway, old PI's *can* still serve. Not the latest or fastest but oft ADEQUATE and now very CHEAP.

Pi's fill a valuable niche between microcontrollers and 'real PCs'. So long as the makers remember that we're all good.

But they are no longer so "competitive" in that area. Look up "BeeLink" units. The lower end ARE pretty competitive with Pi5 fer sure, and WILL run full Winders if you're stupid enough to use it.

They want stuff that WORKS for whatever their needs and is also SMALL and CHEAP.

Pi5 maybe fills that need, but so do competitors now.

If PI tries to compete with laptops from a few years ago then it'll LOSE. No POINT.

If someone builds a PI that is as expensive/capable as an old laptop, for more money, then doom ....

Microcontrollers are a completely different area. PICOs and competitors are ROUGHLY of equal price and performance. This makes the PICO a competitor, but not a clear dominator. Ards DO still have a clear place in the world ... and some of the more recent dual-processor ones ARE very interesting. However if you need micro-power, solar perhaps the older 8-bit Ards still prevail, and there's endless libs/examples to use.