The problem is that you can wipe the Windows and install any free and open-source Linux distro on N100 mini PC. Intel's mainline Linux support has always been top-notch.
If the total cost for the machine with 8GB of ram and a 512 GB SSD is $135 dollars they didn't rob you at all, the cost of Windows license for Tiny PCs is almost nothing@@dinckelman
especially when for a lot of people it wasnt the type of tinkering which a single board pc often is designed around, it was the affordability and convinience to purchase When mini pcs started properly flooding the market in the last few years, and at prices not all desimilar to the raspberry pi in the early days, mixed with the raspberry pi shortage, only people wanting what the single board computers were designed around desparately sought them out, Meanwhile people who either just wanted to tinker about with linux, have a small computer, or things that dont really relate to the hardware of the rpi, just bought either these mini pcs from amazon or the second hand ones that buisnesses flooded the market with at this point.
I remember when it came out it was never that cheap. More like $50 something. I remember it distinctly because I bought a much more powerful ARM microcontroller dev board with lots of breakout for like $9 LOL
@@comedyreliefguy5112 I actually found it the other day. It was a 2" square board with USB and a breakout for GPIO. I think it was an ARM9. Just a generic china board
You have to remember why the Raspberry Pi was created in the first place. As a tool for schools, children and the like, which earned the company charitable status. Upton decided to prioritise business's but did not relinquish the charitable status, which he clearly abused in making the decision. So it is not the Pi itself that may have become something of a villain but the creator.
@@Design_nowhen you built a brand name from the community that maximizes it's use and then betray that community by making it unaffordable for small projects, he's clearly betraying the people who made Pi so big to begin with.
Dance with the one who brought you. Raspberry Pi betrayed the customer base that built their entire company from nothing. But apparently there was a prettier girl at the shindig.
@@Design_nobud if your local food bank started giving the food you donated to rich people so they could sell marke it up and sell it to poor people yould be pissed. But no when they take the money we thought was going to kids its okay
For me it was definitely during the shortage when every content creator and their mother had seemingly endless access to whatever they wanted so they could show off cool projects that no normal consumer could hope to replicate unless they spent exorbitant prices to scalpers.
"Here's my 128 node Raspberry Pi cluster with 500 TB of storage that I built out of spare parts and 8 4080TI GPUs while using the money from my newspaper route..."
And Jeff was one of them. But he got them for free. I’m a subscriber from his Ansible days. I haven’t unsubscribed, but that rubbed me the wrong way and I don’t watch most of his videos anymore.
Most of the "issues" with the N100 box were issues with windows, not the hardware itself, put debian on it for a decently fair comparison. For reference, my N100 box, which is very similar to the one here, idles at around 4-5W, not as good as the pi, but much better than with windows. Also I think we're kinda missing the point of an SBC here, for general desktop computing, an SBC is always gonna be a poor value. The strength of the pi and other SBCs is their IO. They're great for projects where you need to interface with the real world through sensors, actuators, indicators, and non-USB user inputs. If you're building a robot that needs potentiometers on each joint, position sensors, and status LEDs, then use a pi, that's what it's made for. If you want a small, portable, low power desktop, get a mini PC, that's what they're made for. That's why I'm not a big fan of the Pi 5, it just doesn't really fit anywhere, it's too expensive to casually embed into a project, but not powerful enough for a good desktop experience. It's cool to have the capabilities of a Pi 5, but how many situations actually need GPIO pins AND 8GB of RAM? The niche case of moderately high-end robotics that actually has those requirements has long since been filled the Jetson nano stuff (granted, the pi is a fair bit cheaper). It just doesn't have much a real place.
Also, on a fresh Windows install, it does lots of stuff in the background. Windows could be more power efficient than Linux at times(for example in Laptops)
Yeah, I thought that was a bit disingenuous on Jeff's part. Getting something like an Ubuntu image on a USB drive and booting the 'live CD' version is less work than getting the OS image installed on the NVMe SSD.
If you want a slick windows which doesn't run a lot of trash at background, you can always "sail overseas", and get some enterprise/LTSC version of the OS, and go for Win10, not 11. You still get almost all advantages of Windows, including WSL, with no one of the drawbacks of the "consumer" versions.
If the goal is to interface with the real world for sensors and outputs, then a Pi running a GPOS (General Purpose Operating System) is really not the best option anyway. the ESP32 with it's RTOS (Real Time Operating System) is far better suited to the task, and they are cheap as chips too... ESP ate Raspberries lunch, and their lack of supply and rising prices don't make that any easier. Perhaps the Pi is already on its trajectory to becoming a defacto embedded GPOS within business PIC systems, the very market that was getting supplies when the rest of us were put on hold by Raspberry for nearly 3 years. That decision combined with the introduction of the ESP32 will doom the Pi for tinkerers which form the backbone of the Pi community, that in itself is the very reason commercial customers even looked at the Pi in the first place...
yeah I noticed that as well but I have 64 GB DDR4 paired with an I7 K 10th gen, and there aren't many use cases where the CPU isn't the limiting factor. I know it's a laptop and the heat is the source of the issue but I imagine the mini PC would run into similar issues. I just don't see a case where something with less computing power than an i3 can use 32 GB. maybe 16 gb for a tab hoarder but I think that is still likely to crash from the CPU being over-extended in some capacity. but maybe I'm wrong after all I have no experience with the mini PC.
@@weirdwarlock625honestly you're wrong in terms of cooling because laptops have to consider thickness as a limiting factor and mini PC doesn't so it can fit larger fans and even faster fan if they want to. Cooling isn't an issue, especially if it isn't a laptop running high end CPU on a Intel generation known for generating lots of heat. I have an old laptop that I stuck a big RAM in it and it runs really well. Unless you're playing all 4k video on 20 tabs, it won't chug down. It takes very little, almost negligible power to keep one tab running, and it doesn't render anything on screen so it's not even taxing to the system at all. Modern browser also freeze tabs that aren't in use.
@DarkExternalHeart perhaps my laptop is dirty, I was only speaking to my personal experience. I've usually encountered thermal throttling before maxing out ram with my 64 gb setup and usually hover around 35 gb usage with about 500 chrom tabs open. Maybe your laptop has better cooling than mine. I have a msi GF 75 thin 10.
My takeaway from this is that computing is so cheap nowadays! My first PC cost $1500 and had only a fraction of the CPU and storage of any of the machines shown. Now I have mini PCs, several Pis and even an old HP refurb from Amazon that lived out its life computing spreadsheets on someone's desk. I run various different OSs, have networks set up as a playground. When I started as a programmer I used to go into work at the weekends just so I could play with the hardware in the machine room, now I have all that and more sitting around my den at home.
I remember when I was in my teens in the 90's my dad got a 5GB HDD and it's echoed in my hear ever since "I don't know how I'd use all this". I have 6TB in my desktop right now, I was cleaning the other week and found a 1TB m.2 drive just hanging out at the bottom of a pile of cords lol
@@WillSams In the mid nineties for "only" $2000 I got a pentium 75 hotrod of it's day. Then they invented these fancy fangled things video cards we called them. It was like a computer you put in your computer. Hey I hear you like computers let's put 2 more computers in your computer and link them up. We called that crossfire and all the cool kids wanted to do it.
My first bought wass a 8086 xt with 64 kb on mobo rest up to 256 kb was on daughterboard. My FIRST pc I build my self, it was a Zilog Z80A totalling around $3000 plus case, keyboard and 8" floppy station, full decked out with 2 floppy and a blistering CGA monitor it was something like $1000-1400
With the Pi's price increase (yes yes I know you can technically still get one for $35 but certainly not a Pi 5), and the need to buy so many extras it's become pretty pointless to use it as a dedicated machine when mini pc's are so cheap now. Even the older Thinkcentres which can be picked up sub $100 on ebay far outstrip it in performance. I wouldn't say the Pi is a villain, but it's certainly no longer the go-to solution, not even close to it. The shortage certainly didn't help, nor did some of their very sketchy and questionable behaviour on social media (their incredibly hostile and rude responses to people on twitter and their own forums being a prime example, they still ban new users for asking genuine questions just because they don't like hearing them) helped push people away from wanting to work with them. I think they've just evolved. They are no longer the loveable opensource, friendly community focused product maker. They're a corporation who realised B2B was vastly more profitable, and the hobbyist market has become very much secondary. They slowed down on the push into education massively over the last couple of years to the point where they don't really seem to be interested in it anymore so it's not too surprising.
A lot of that is because there's basically no reason to cover the educational sector in that way. Schools don't teach electronic fundamentals much any more
The thing I kinda miss with older Pis is the "you already have most of what you need" ethos. You already have a phone charger, you already have a USB keyboard and mouse, you probably already have an HDMI monitor, and if you don't you can just use your TV, and there's a good chance you can borrow an SD card from something. I know better hardware is more power hungry, but it seems to have lost the kid friendly idea of buying a computer with your pocket money and not needing anything else to get started. Now you have to get a special power supply and a special display cable, and maybe a special case to keep it cool.
i absolutely hate that they switched to micro HDMI adapters. now you have to not only buy a proprietary charger but you also have to buy a proprietary video cable to use the thing. not to mention needing a fan or cooling system to even play video without throttling.
@@jimster1111Nah, you can use several different things to power them. Like just your average fast charge USB-C cable that comes with any Android based phones, as long as it's plugged into a fairly decent Charging brick that meets the however many watts they require, or...you can buy the official charging brick cable with a built-in On/off toggle switch into the cable so you don't have to manually unplug the cable to cut power to it. They're only about $20 max for the official power supply cable. And...I completely forgot about my buddy who runs Raspberry Pi's in a server stack and they are all powered using PoE (Power over Ethernet). Where both your network connection and enough power to supply each Raspberry Pi all coming through the Ethernet port. (I would say iPhone 15's USB-C cables as well....but Apple is so shady they just kept using the EXACT same physical cables that they've been using for a decade+ for lighting cables, but just put a USB-C connection on the end instead of a lightning port....which are all USB 2.0 speeds)
I'm mostly surprised they didn't use a more compliant USB-PD protocol chip to take advantage of all the USB PD power bricks out there, they decided to use one that requires 5V/5A which is technically compliant but not usually supported. The HDMI adapter is annoying than anything else.
yea but maybe you want better hardware (more recent pi) because you need better performance. Like if you're doing image recognition with the Pi while controlling multiple sensors and servos
Kind of. The point of the pi was to be a low power mirco controller based PCB with 40 GPIO pins not a desktop replacement. The pi 3B+ and pi 4 kind of went to the performance needed to be a good low cost low power general use desktop replacement.
Also, as a former dell service technician for laptops: get a magnet mat with a grid on it, to keep those pesky screws in place. Also helps with remembering in what order you took them off, though that's less of a problem with this few screws.
In Australia, today's price for a Pi5 without the hat, using a micro SD, with all the other bits is $214. At the same time, an 8Gig ram, 128G ssd windows 10 PC from Amazon is $158. We are a long way from the originally touted benefits of a $35 computer (which it never was here anyway).
@@expression3639It does, it just requires you to rtfm to use them. In a stroke of extreme irony, NUCs have ended up being the cheaper and "hacker friendly" option where if you are prepared to learn some things about how computers work, you get a really cool machine for tinkering, while Pi has become the corporation that's grown inefficient and fat by cornering the education market where teachers force schools or students to pay inflated prices for mediocre hardware and nicely graphically designed boxes and accessories. www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/boardsandkits/custom-solutions-header-whitepaper.pdf
Raspberry pi kinda had a mission statement. They wanted to make these cheap and readily available so that people would get interested in the hobby. At first, it worked. I got my first kit for $55 and I've been tinkering with computers ever since. We all know what happened after that with prices and availability. But I can honestly say that I'm thankful for what they did.
I would have liked to see them work towards also creating a set of standards that would enable all their work on the software and OS side to be used on a wider range of ARM SBCs. During the shortage software was always the biggest issue with any of the boards that advertised themselves as alternatives or clones. It was often extremely difficult to much with them because they couldn't run the software needed to build on something that had already been done on the RasPi. PCs solved this issue decades ago and I wish the ARM ecosystem could do the same.
Then came the industrialists came along and bought massive quality. Then the bread crumbs that were left were gobbled up by scalpers with their 30% markup. Which means zero availability for regular plebes!!
@@splynncryth I honestly think they would've switched over to RISC-V since the actual instruction set can be completely open source with no locked out blobs like on ARM (see what companies like Atmel and Nvidia do to fuck over OEMs).
I belive the RPi pico is more of the focus for hobbist as the raspi A and B seem to get caught up in a mountian of problems. From scalpers to python code that does not work. It would be cool though if for the hobbist the RPi team beefed up the RPi zero and stuck it at a $20 price point.
The key point here is "if you're looking for a desktop computer". Pis have _never_ excelled at this role (despite frequent claims to the contrary), and have been downright abysmal at it up until the Pi 5. You get a Pi because you have specific connectivity needs or you're using it embedded or for a special purpose, not just because you want a "cheap desktop". The GMKtec is a pretty slick little unit though, thanks for showcasing it!
Bingo, bingo, bingo. Came here to say the exact same thing. A Pi is not a particularly good desktop PC and there's very little reason to try and use one as such. I don't understand why everybody who reviews Pi products immediately jumps into a desktop GUI environment and starts trying to watch TH-cam videos. What the Pi excels at is being small (especially in the CM form factor), having GPIO for interfacing with various sensors and actuators, and being embeddable - including being able to run without a dedicated fan in many configurations. I really can't understand why anybody would buy a Raspberry Pi for video editing, or watching 4K video, etc. But to each his own. "Different strokes for different folks" and all that.
@PhillipRhodes RPI 5 is not powerful enough to be a desktop 4k video viewer... but it's got too much power for running sensors and actuators or a PIHole. RPI 3 could do it.
@@habafflofYes! Exactly this. If it’s not a good desktop, stop adding more display connectors, and stop using beefy GPUs that drive power consumption through the roof while bringing no benefit for headless users. If it’s designed to be a desktop pc, then put normal display connectors on it instead of a strange connector no one uses, and put all the ports on one side!
@@PhillipRhodes I agree, but the inverse is equally true: I don't understand why someone would spend $130+ when they could get a mini pc with better specs for double digits and just buy a $15 USB to GPIO. Cheap, and modular let us roll the dice on an I2c bit bang that might fry the board or solve a problem in a cool way. Who's doing that with $130? Not me. So who is the intended consumer? What is the intended trajectory? Personally, I'm worried it's going from Acorn computer to Apple.
@@explocevoyou could buy a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W for $5 and solder on the header pins, or get one with headers on there already for a bit more. Also, you can run the Pico on its own once programmed. Even the USB to GPIO header is expensive compared to a Pico.
Love the part where he says "is it a good time to segue to a sponsor? No, it's not". I like this presenter's style, goes into enough detail without overdoing it. I've been tinkering with both Raspberry Pi and low power Intel boards for a few years. I've found fitness for usage depends on what you want to do with it. I've had a PLEX server running on a low powered Intel Celeron processor for several years.
That was my original pi project was plex server. There was something wrong with either the power supply or mini hdmi when plugged in every few seconds there'd be an audible click and it would drive me crazy.
@CCherriosful The backlash has caused them to make some changes. The rollout of the Pi5 is a vast improvement. But yeah, the only reason they are doing this is because DIY guys were jumping ship enmasse.
"Some assembly required" The DIY nature of the Pi is not a negative at all IMO. In fact, it's to a large degree the very point. A part of the use-case of these devices since its inception is to teach children/people about computing and electronics. Making people navigate through relevant conventions, standards, processes, and procedures to do things gives them a logic and intuition for computers, and problem-solving skills that would simply not be there if all it was was a plug-and-play solution. And for experienced people, the assembly is either enjoyable, or so easy that it's no trouble at all. The DIY nature and requirement of Pi's is a good thing.
Correct. It's a feature, not a bug. The barrier to entry is relatively low, as low as it can be for what is designed to be accessible at the bare-metal level. But it's intentionally _not_ a black box that "just works." If that's what you want, buy a computer. They both exist in parallel, and one isn't mutually exclusive of the other.
Interesting to watch how, over time, the Raspberrypi has moved from being a STEM part emphasizing the GPIO functionality, to being a small computer that you can sometimes hook stuff to.
Yeah, the biggest change that bothered me was the microHDMI ports so they can handle two displays. If you are trying to run two monitors from a Pi, you are doing it wrong. I want the single full size HDMI port back.
@@QualityDoggo so a mini-pc isn't a well-known and well-documented device for you? As for the computing power, who cares, it's cheaper and idles at similar power draw
Most of the projects that I would have used a Pi to make I now use a Pi Nano. Even though the hardware is limited the price can't be beat ($10 w/BT; $5 w/o). I can make a lot of neat projects (digital thermometer, soil moisture monitor, keyboard expansion, etc) that won't break the bank and won't be overkill as it would be for something like the Pi 5.
I was on rpi4 for a long time until I jumped to N100 a few months ago. The first thing i did was to wipe windows and install ubuntu. It turns out the N100 is MUCH more capable than rpi4, especially on HW encoding. I can finally burn subtitles in jellyfin real-time!
@@dougle03 I guess certain drivers and settings may have had a small amount of effect.. Though not by much. You would have had the same or a small bit more performance if you switched the N100 to linux. This depends on the distro, DesktopEnvironment/WindowManager settings, drivers installed, default kernel settings, and etc.. Not all distros are created equally, some run on an older kernel vs some running newer kernels; Release types: [Stable, LTS, Fixed, Semi-Rolling, Rolling]. I'm probably missing a few things here, but I think that's the main bits or hurdles.
The raspberry pi foundation became the villain for two reasons. During the shortage they rubbed many hobbyists face in it when they announced they were going against their own objectives. And decided to supply business customers over end users. Then hiring a surveillance cop. And blocking people when the pointed out issue.
Being an electronic designer, I would say it is rarely DIY is cheaper than buying, so pricing was not a surprise, but the excitement in DIY is in general worth the difference :).
It's also pretty ridiculous to compare a brand new SBC with a mini-PC that has probably been used for 5 years by a corporate entity that has complete depreciated its value and is dumping it on the 2nd-hand market for whatever spare change they can get for it. It's like comparing a value meal from a fast food joint to a can of beans on the clearance shelf of a supermarket, and complaining about how much your burger cost. (EDIT: To be clear, this is regarding frequent comments about picking up an HP or Dell mini PC for less, not the particular Intel thing here. That is a whole other ball of wax, namely the economies of scale of a behemoth like Intel when they want to drop a 0% margin product because they can.)
Aside from the reliability in finding non-scalped Pis, I think they moved into a pricing segment where you could get more compatible, flexible, powerful options for a tiny bit more. Why go through the trouble of stringing together a bunch of hats and accessories when for about $120 you can get a well-capable N100? Raspberry Pis are in the uncomfortable stage where they either need to offer something more powerful than the N100 or double down on better/cheaper versions of lower segment offerings. More powerful or feature rich Pi Zeros, for instance.
Or buy Orange Pi 5 which has superior Rockchip RK3588 on 8nm Samsung process (RPI5 is on old 16nm). Basically same CPU Cortex A76 as RPI5 however RK3588 has also additional 4x Cortex A55 Little cores which gives excellent 1 W idle power consumption and higher MT performance. Also RK3588 uses original ARM Mali GPU (much better performance and drivers than home-brew RPI5 Videocore something) and as last thing RK3588 has NPU for AI acceleration with 1 TOPs (which RPI5 lacks entirely). And Orange Pi 5 is cheaper, available and has M2 SSD port bult-in as standard. Also has 16GB and 32GB RAM options. And OPI5 Plus version has 2x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports which can run as home router. Orange Pi 5 is new SBC king rather then just cheap alternative RPI5.
@@richard.20000Orange Pi boards have historically been poorly supported on the software side, and models come and go on a whim. If it's just faster hardware and more features that you want, fair enough. If you require regular software updates and guarantees on long term support, you may find them lacking. There's a reason why the Raspberry Pi outsells the Orange Pi.
For me the Pi Pico has now become what the original Raspberry Pi was to me, it’s cheap and barebones with some IO. I actually have to do some engineering to get things to run on the limited resources it offers which I find part of the fun.
Yup, and finally there's meaningful USB libraries (via TinyUSB library) and useful code examples. The Pico can give a standard PC GPIO and A-D pretty easily.
With the Pico plugged into a VGA or DVI/HDMI board with writable SD Card and Basic it becomes the thing that the Pi vision was described as originally: a machine like the BBC, C64, etc. that a kid could turn on, boot immediately and enter a learning environment (the Basic REPL). This exists now if a techy adult can put the pieces together for the kid. Personally, I'd replace the Basic interpreter with a Micropython REPL as it's a better language for a child to start with in the 21st centaury but I don't believe the software pieces are there yet for Micropython to self host a write / run / debug loop on the device directly, but there is no reason it couldn't.
I dabble in modifying old consoles and the pi pico is a revolution in the mod chip scene. What were once $80-100 mod chips are now $10-20. So many talented people are producing new firmware because these chips are easily accessible and the hobbyist community is so active and documents things well. We are even seeing the pico chip integrated into pcbs with flex ribbons for easy installation. And there's basically no supply shortages unlike proprietary mod designs of yore given that many follow open source principles
Comparing the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico is like comparing apples and oranges. The Raspberry Pi has an applications processor while the Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller.
We also have no idea if Windows was done with updates, indexing, etc. As another commenter said, throw Linux on there and then compare if you want an equitable comparison.
Good luck with the not-dropping-a-screw mission. I've never been able to beat that one yet either and I've been doing DIY electronics for 45+ years. Great video!
My first Pi cost $35, didn't need a fan or heat sink, and used an old USB phone charger (so free) for the power source. At first I used a couple of hand bent and drilled squares of Lexan for a "case" (eventually, cases got cheaper). It performed its automation job for all that time, until being retired a few years ago to a farm upstate (I'm told). My alternative at the time would have been a compact PC that would cost a lot more (even used), was the size of a couple of laptops stacked up, needed mains power to the case, consumed a lot of that power, had a noisy fan, and booted from a mechanical hard-drive. It WAS a no-brainer, but now the industry is very different. The Pi isn't a villain, it's a victim of evolving technology, and economies of scale.
If the Pi didn't exist, it's possible that companies wouldn't have noticed the value of mini-PCs and the market not be flooded with them now. I believe the Pi helped drive the industry to where it is today.
@samyaspapa - I absolutely agree! The Pi showed the possibility (and popularity) of a minimal system and then (just bad timing) went into hibernation. When people will pay >$300 for something that was $35, the market notices, and will pivot. The problem now is that Pi is chasing a market they can't compete with. I have yet to buy a 5, and I don't know if I will. I'd rather have a 3 with a little more memory, a little more performance, and less power and heat of the 4 & 5. Maybe Gb Ethernet and USB 3. If I want a small, fast Linux system, I'll buy one of these micro PCs and do an install.
@@samyaspapa Yup. It's like Starbucks: They serve shitty, burnt coffee in their soulless, generic, consummately-corporate shops ... but without them, decent coffee shops wouldn't exist in North America.
I'd say it's when the social media account of the manufacturing side attacked and blocked people for simply asking why they hired a former surveillance officer to a higher position in their company.
That's when they became the villain in my circles, too. The guy boasted about building surveillance gear out of raspberry pis and how much fun it was. When was that ever going to be received positively?
The real problem with Raspberry Pi is just their availability. Their popularity still means that they are the best choice in most cases, none of the alternatives have it's community support. It's just that they seem incapable at scaling their production to the demand of their product.
Each model seems to have had this issue at launch... but most of them eventually hit a steady state. The Pi 4 was the first to achieve that equilibrium-then the shortages hit. The CM4 and Pi Zero 2 W were both almost never available, relative to their lifespan, and are only now available in quantity :( Hopefully the Pi 5 will overcome the supply/demand shock soon-I certainly hope the CM5 will come out of the gate better than CM4.
Well after COVID it seems to be that any new popular device,chip, MOSFET etc gets an early availability issue Over builting production line will have consciousness later on
It depends on your use case. For desktop, this micro PC is much better. You can install any Linux distro on it and upgrade it for many years. The Pi is better for experimenting with and IoT.
X64 hardware is sufficiently interchangeable, that you will have good driver support and don't get many issues ARM SBCs other than the Pi can be a mess though. A Pi is probably still a good recommendation to someone who is very new to the field and the best for some use cases. But if you just need a low power server, just get a miniPC.
Hi Jeff, the little metal bar you wondered about is a VESA mount so you can put the mini-PC on the back of the monitor. Then you have an all-in-one computer. 😉
On of the biggest selling points for me are the GPIO ports. With a Raspberry Pi you get a computer that also works as a full fledged microcontroller. In that aspect, it's just wonderful
@@antagonista8122 That is why i buy gen 1-2 pi-s, they are dirt cheap (you can find 1rst gen for 5$), and they are still functioning pretty well with CLI systems. In bonus i found them more stable than rp4/5, they need less power (one of them is literally running from the USB-port of my router), and again, they are dirt cheap. You don't need the power of a pi5 for an MCU(especially with all the crap you need for it, 5A power supply and cables will get it anywhere but to the place you want to actively use a gpio at), there are better solutions for that.
RPi started with hobbyists. Now they cater to corporations like Samsung, LG, Sharp, etc. who are putting RPi CM4's into commercial TVs used for marketing signage, etc. There's a ton of other corporate companies buying up RPi and all this contributed to the shortages the last few years because RPi gave those corporate customers priority. This made is next to impossible to source the best CM4's and RPi4's. I bought a couple TuringPi v2 cluster boards, couldn't obtain any CM4's (at least the SKUs I wanted). Finally TuringPi released their RK1 RockChip compatible with RPi4. The RK1 is better than the CM4 and I don't need a daughter board to put it into the TuringPiv2 and they sold big heatsinks with fans.
It makes sense though. A commercial buyer like that, buying in bulk, will have an agreement for guaranteed delivery of the requested quantity and the requested time, with penalties for failing. So if supplies are short, Raspberry Pi Trading must prioritise meeting their contractual obligations to those customers. And those customers like the Pi and CM4 because it's very well supported and low cost.
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@@alvaros8769 "I buy 10k now" (to scalp,. but I don't need to tell them). So scalpers get priority (as the miners and scalpers did in the times of the GPU shortage).
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@@vylbird8014 It's RPT's decision to enter those contracts. You can't *make* someone enter such a contract.
I don’t think it was just SBC which stole Pi 4/5’s lunch. ESP32’s also became very popular, cheap and incredibly versatile. ESPHome made them very easy to configure compared to the days of .ino files.
@@JeffGeerling There is a gap between the Pico and the PO. I can't wait until they fill it with something, be it more variants of the RP2040 (with more RAM) or a Coretex M3 or even M7, maybe something like a combination of the RP1 and the RP2040.
If you drop screws on the ground, put a flashlight on the ground to cast long horizontal shadows from any little speck on the floor. Makes it so much easier to find things. Or utilize a magnet, even though we still haven't figured out how they work
Don’t do this if you have young kids and pets because all you’ll find is the horror show of fur, hair, and crumbs blanketing the floor you thought was clean.
I got a magnetic pad, it's about the size of a mousepad, and you can set a screw down on it and it stays put. It has grid lines so you can put the screws down and remember where they go.
Four things: 1) With the GMKtec, you can, of course, always wipe the Windows 11 install and install Linux as well. (or just swap the drive if you want to keep the Windows license key) 2) Speaking of the Windows license key, if you subtract that from the cost of the GMKtec mini PC. 3) If you compute the performance/$/Watt, the answer my surprise you. 4) It REALLY depends on what you want to do with the systems. Proxmox on ARM is still technically experimental.
You don't get license keys stuck on the case anymore. You don't even get the key if its OEM. The license key is stored in UEFI if it's pre-installed so when you reinstall you won't need to enter it when you reinstall. Even if you purchase a key after it's tied to that mainboard/uefi so it won't need to be reactivated.
@@AndrewMurphy1 Depends on specific implementation. Not all Mini PCs are set up this way. For my Beelink GTR5 5900HX, I just emailed them what's my key and they sent it to me via email. But later on, I learned that there is actually a method where you can READ the key that's currently used/installed, so as long as you "read"/"export" that, and save that to a file, then I can skip emailing them.
@@AngelaTheSephira That's actually NOT always entirely true. Depending on which Mini PC you've purchased, if one of the first things that you do is to extract the default Windows key, and then wipe the drive -- per your comment, you would THINK that's how it works, but that's not always necessarily how it actually works, in reality. Ask me how I know this.
The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering. An N100 will destroy the Pi in raw specs but not necessarily be the best educational tool. My parents got me a Raspberry Pi 1B for Christmas over a decade ago and I’m so thankful for the learning the Pi ecosystem has provided me. For servers I run low power Dells but if I ever have kids they’re getting Pi’s!
The Pi ecosystem stopped being educational when the foundation concentrated on add-ons, more ram, cpu cycles and industrial components. It's now nothing like what Upton said was needed, wanted or would be built.
'The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering.' Not once they decide to cover the industrial market for more money without also pumping out the few extra to satisfy said educational and tinkering market.
Ya, but to be fair to jeff, one would expect a VESA mount to be square. The first time I saw that bracket I didn't know it was VESA compatible until I read the manual.
@@pity4279 Such a tiny thing only needs the top two screws on a standard vesa mount im guessing. Great to be able to put it behind you monitor, though have to have an easy way to turn the thing on.
This video was timely. Just last week I decided I'm done with the Pi. There's tons of applications that it's perfect for, but it just doesn't suit my emulation needs anymore. I have a Pi 4 running Retropie and it was alright a few years ago when I finished the project, but now that mini pcs are at this price point they're just the best option. I wanted to do this again with the Pi 5, but it's just too much trouble for too little return. Supply shortages, a world of crappy cases that don't fit my needs, waiting months or years for the Retropie team to cobble together a stable build, poor performance...I bought the exact same GMKtec a few months ago for an arcade cabinet project and the thing doesn't run into any problems until I try to run a Dreamcast game. For $320 I could get something that runs PS3 emulators.
I think for less than 320 you could get an actual ps3. something that occurred to me during the video was the repurposing of used school chrome books. Their silicon is still working but they get limited by Google's updates to phase them out within two years. It is way more work than the mini PC and possibly the Pi as well since you have to basically jailbreak them but from my understanding, the price to performance not including sweat equity is not so bad.
Great content, in the end you’re always going to have a consumer who wants to buy and drive a car, then there’s the enthusiast who enjoys working and modify everything on the car.
I don't see raspi as a villain but I do think prioritizing commercial customers was a mistake. It let the scalper market thrive and drove most hobbyists to look at alternatives. I know I haven't been able to afford continuing with them and it affected me in a way where I haven't been interested to see if the hobbyist market for raspi has recovered. Love the product. Just can't get them, or couldn't for long enough that I've erased the platform as an option for my projects, in my own mind.
User-upgradable RAM is another advantage of the tiny PC. Also, Rpi OS does come with an office suite and other software which could be considered “bloat” if you don’t need it. I think RPi became the enemy when they gave people what they said they wanted: a desktop replacement Pi.
@@Klaevin Jeff says the N100 machine with Win11 has Office at 18:42. Also, Win11 is pretty bad overall, so I'm not dying on that hill. But the hardware... I mean, you could run a plethora of Linux distros on any X86/X64 machine and a TON more Linux software than on the Pi. Don't get me wrong, I like that RPi comes bundled with an Office suite. But you can't have that as a plus on the RPi and a minus on the Win11 PC. You either want Office (or Libreoffice or whatever) or not.
@@MarcosCodas I missed that part. Sorry. I would like to add that since you have to pay to keep office on windows, and it comes pre-installed, it's more if a bloat, than something that just comes bundled. I wouldn't call windows defender "bloat" but "1 free year of Norton!" definitely is. This seems like a gray area and trying to say where the line is for "bloat" is going to be personal. I mean, some people consider GUIs as bloat.
And often more upgradeable than the specs indicate. With the exception of the N100's that have soldered on memory, of which I own a few, many of the N100's that use laptop memory can indeed be upgraded to 32G of ram instead of the spec 16G that Intel states. This is also true for the 8 core N305's as well. Most of my N100's have dual 2.5G NICs as well, plus wifi. There are more expensive N100's with soldered memory - but these things are TINY, may as well be called MICRO'S .. We're talking 3 inches square by 2 inches tall. Some of these have FOUR 2.5 G NICs.
About a year ago I bought a used dell miniPC instead of a Pi for a game emulator project. The experience definitely changed my opinion on SBCs, unless I need something very tiny and barebones, it almost always makes sense to go with these x86 miniPCs now that they’re about as cheap and almost always more powerful.
I have to admit. I have been playing with Raspberry Pis forever. I have about a dozen of them in various sizes. I've build a NAS, an OpenVPN server, a Media player, a rain detector, remote hedgehog camera system, CCTV DVR etc etc - but this December I bought 2 BMAX mini PCs for around $100 (well £85 TBH) each. I now have a PC NAS (Openmediavault) and I'm using the other as a media player. I can't imagine buying another Pi unless I need something with digital I/O.
To be fair to the GMKtec, you're under no obligation to use windows. It is great that it comes with a license, but you can flash linux the same way you would with the pi.
@@john_in_phoenix Yes, but reality is - we're talking Chinese here; not sure how many come with legit licenses, or if it was just "hacked" and not discoverable by Microsoft.
A few family members have asked for a simple office pc, and I always look for a cheap, refurbished small form factor Dell Optiplex. The quality is fantastic, they're build to run 24/7, they usually have an i5 from 3rd to 6th gen, have 8 GB of memory and nowadays they sell them with new SSD's (so I don't have to replace the old HDD myself) for anywhere between $90 and $150. But, that new GMKtec sure does look like a great option to me.
@@NoName-py4en He means 2nd hnd trade ins or ex-lease. Depending on where you are a local pc shop may have them. Dell's are quite popular here & plenty of ex lease available. The other option maybe local recycler of e-waste as we have some here that rebuild dumped pc's. Even local businesses may have some in a back room due to upgrading
I never could find the "$5 Pi Zero" for under $25. That's the problem, they've always been way more costly than their advertised price. With the exception of the Pi Pico, with all the RP2040 clones, I can actually get one for $4. The black clone anyway.
Yeah, for even less than the mini-PC.. if that's important.. you can get a 2011/2012 Mac Mini that's silent, runs Linux, and even being 13 years old will runs circles around the Pi 4 (except on power budget).
Besides N100 PCs offer upgradability. It can run VMs with sufficient memory since its just x64. So given the right N100, N200, N300 etc. boards, you could get configs with multiple ethernet ports and run it a VM machine with Proxmox in a compact size. There are tons of variants out there each offering their own uses as NAS, VM server, based on what I/O they provide.
@@thisisreallyme3130 Those have weird power supplies though. Obviously not everyone is off grid with a less than top tier inverter but if you are, the PFC in those can cause some crazy LED flickering.
Thing is, businesses are eating up Raspberry Pis like hotcakes! They're part of the supply chain(I was once part of a company that assembled gigantic pipe cutters) They rely on the reputation and reliability that the brand provides, so the company is almost always strapped for supply. Hence why us as individuals have to move to these less reliable, albeit more affordable Chinese brands. I can't imagine a gigantic mining machinery running on a Minisforum.
Definitely in the "dropping a damn screw on the ground and searching for it for 10+ minutes" club right with you. Between drones, 3D printers, and computers, I've dropped enough screws to fasten a car together...
Use a cloth or something soft on your workbench, the screws wont bounce when dropped. Use a cloth with a contrasting colour to what you are working with.
@@Voyajer. Keep in mind Jeff suffers from a chronic condition like a lot of us do. Mine is diabetes, he explained his in another great video. These conditions often reduce your body's ability to fight infections, so shoes are a MUST have for those who can't afford to have damage to their feet.
The N100's iGPU is its major ace in the hole - 4K HEVC transcoding, more emulation horsepower, real hardware-accelerated video editing chops... The Pi costs too much and delivers too little. Also, the N100 has many more PCIe lanes, leading to the existence of cool router / NAS boards based on it.
I actually bought the GMKtec NucBox G3 recently (I was also considering Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 Plus) - my use case is a home server / TV media center. I bought barebone version and added 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB NVMe (I didn't care about Windows and just installed Debian Linux on it). At least in my area the cost was pretty much te same for N100 vs Rasp 5 (Raspberry is less cost effective than it used to be and it gets worse if you have to buy a HAT for SSD). One thing I can say is that Linux is a bit more energy efficient than Windows - at idle my GMKtec NucBox G3 was consuming 8 W. But then, I noticed that in BIOS pretty much all energy saving options are disabled by default. Once I enabled Render Standby for GPU, C states for CPU, all ASPM options for all PCIE slots that allow it and I turned off some things I don't use (like SATA controller, also disabled WiFi and Bluetooth in the OS) I finally ended with 4 - 4.5 W range in idle.
Yeah, that's more like it, your idle numbers mirror what's been reported on the STH forum megathread for the N100 devices. I've got the N100's older brother, an N5105, and with 2-3 2.5 Gbe ports active and no real BIOS tuning, it sits a little over 8.5 w running OpenWrt linux...
@@TheKetsa Those don't have as much processing power if you need it, neither do they have wired ethernet, expandable storage, easy video output, etc...
Though you could buy a raspberry pi pico and an old laptop, hook them up via usb and use the laptop to control most of the GPIO on the pi pico, and have the laptop's processing power to do whatever
@@TheKetsaIf I wanted to build a fully self-sustained computer vision system with object detection, I’d need a pi as object detection is very resource heavy (using this example because it’s exactly what I’m currently doing), I’ll need the GPIO pins too, as I need to control other pieces of hardware (motors, servo’s, etc) directly from the pi.
@@demonman1234what they are saying is you can just implement sensors, motors etc on an MCU host, all the resource heavy compute is done on a laptop/pc which communicates to the MCU by USB etc. very similar to how klipper works
Nobody sponsors this video... except the sponsors! I get what you're saying (you're not taking any corporate sponsorship, direct sponsorship), it was just really funny to hear that.
I bought one of those N100 Mini PCs for a jank NAS. Plugged in a USB 5-bay SATA JBOD hard drive dock filled with 10TB drives, and shared them on my network. No fancy backup software or anything, just drag-and-drop. One drive is used for Jellyfin media. Once I got it up and running, I run it headless, just sitting on a shelf beside my desk with the dock. It doesn't do anything except share the drives, and encoding when I'm using Jellyfin. It does exactly what I need it to do.
@@radnukespeoplesminds I could have went other ways and did things right, using something like TrueNAS, but I wanted it to be super simple and easy to use. Bought everything from Amazon, and wasn't all that expensive, in my opinion. 100ish for the mini pc, 189ish for the dock, and about 150 for each drive. I'm sure I can set it up somehow to do full backups of my machines on the network, but that's not the point of it. I just use it to keep ISOS of stuff I work on, family photos/videos, and my massive collection of media. I guess it's not stupid/jank if it works.
The popularity of it within the industry combined with scalpers meant nearly every model had shortages. The main appeal is modularity, project versatility (especially with GPIO), low power draw, and community. If that doesn't matter to you, a mini pc is more your speed but it's more limited in some aspects.
This is also my philosophy, if I need gpio I use a pi. If I just need a server of some kind I would go for a mini PC, but I have enough old laptops that I use them. Dante, I have yet to find a good guide to using a pico as gpio from a Linux system. Can you point out a good guide?
@@eslmatt811 There are some projects like picod that talk to the Pi Pico via /dev/ttyACM when its plugged in via USB. So its using the Pico as an expander much like how embedded systems contain both the main processing system (full CPU) and the processing logic (small chip).
The link now takes you to a $160 N100. I'm writing this on the first of February. It seems like lots of Amazon products will raise their price if a popular TH-cam video links to the product. I think it's slimy of the seller to do this sort of thing.
@@ddegn What’s usually actually happening is that the product had multiple vendors selling it for different amounts (some normal, some ridiculous) and when demand spikes the vendors selling it for a low price quickly run out of stock.
@@bergamt Isn't each seller listed on a separate page? I'm pretty sure a link to page on Amazon is only to that seller. So if the price goes up, that seller raised the price. At least that's the way I understand it.
@@ddegn No, a single Amazon product page link can have one or many sellers who all compete to own the “buy box” on the product page (the rest get hidden in the “other sellers” page). The algorithm that Amazon uses to pick a seller is complicated but sale price is a major factor. Google “how to win the Amazon buy box” and you’ll find dozens of articles explaining how it works.
Comparing the Pi running Linux to the N100 running windows invalidates the whole video, sadly. Really, it becomes bs, because windows does run so much crap in the background. You should have ran the same OS on both. Or you should have ran both linux (same distro) and (freshly installed) windows on both.
GMTek is good for people who want just a small homeserver / mediabox / emulation station. The pi with its gpio etc could also be used for that, but the strenghts are definetly on robotics projects etc.
Arduinos of some description are a good option for robotic projects. You could easily interface with them from the gmtek (either wifi or Bluetooth if you use an esp32 as the Arduino, or even just using serial via the USB)
If you need computer vision, the nvidia jetson platform is way more efficient. If you just need movement + basic sensors: arduino arm, esp, stm and pi pico platforms work fine. And if you need more than arm m, pi nano2 is a quadcore that uses way less juice. And if you want a proper arm workstation, there's a macbook apple wants to sell you.
I used to do retro pie for my arcade cabs, and have switched to running launchbox on PC with mini PCs. It got to where a pie wasn’t actually cheaper, and while windows kinda sucks, it’s more “known” in how it sucks than raspbian is. (I have a Linux laptop for work and work as a software engineer on Linux systems. I’m not scared of Unix. But retropie/raspbian behaves weird at times). I don’t hate pies, but mini PCs got better and cheaper as pies got more expensive, and it’s kinda hard to get past that.
How do you get around the Windows update junk, marketing, Microsoft Account, etc. nonsense? There is a big appeal for a "launch and go" system for dedicated stuff (I do robots rather than cabs).
@@RobotWrangler - fair points. I still have Win 10 on some of my arcade mini PCs which avoids some of the more recent Microsoft toxicity, and the newer ones that have Windows 11, I did in fact jump through some hoops with not connecting them to the network and issuing command line overrides when setting them up to allow me to procede with local users, and not letting them download updates with metered connections, which still worked at least on my machines. So it's true that there is futzing to do with Windows, at least if you don't want to deal with Microsoft's bullpoop. But there is initial setup with a pie too, and I still find it easier to maintain the game software on the windows box than I did on the pie. Your mileage may vary for robots.
@@jmcminn1076 Why not install Linux on them? Proton is amazing nowadays and you could setup something with gamescope like steamdecks use to have a proper feeling setup
@@RobotWrangler It's been awhile since I've installed Windows, but last I heard, with 10 or 11 you can just unplug the internet during start-up and it'll let you create a fully local account. The updates AFAIK aren't dodgeable. And yea, they seem to do internal marketing like pitching you use OneDrive, and I'm sure that gets annoying, but I think that stuff is pretty minimal, may even be able to be turned off. There's def. a little extra setup in Windows comparatively. But it's also only a 1-time thing. You spend 20 minutes doing it one day, and you shouldn't have to again. The updates suck.....but Ubuntu/Debian Linux isn't much better at this point. I get kernel updates like every couple of weeks and I feel like I'm constantly either restarting or delaying them. And one thing I'll say about Windows, I used to use it regularly, and only 1 time in the past ~15 years or so have I had a Windows update bork my system. But I've lost more than my fair share of video drivers to kernel updates in Linux. And then sometimes there's problems to rebuild the module and then it's like "OK, I guess my Tuesday afternoon is gonna be 'debug Ubuntu' day instead of work."
I think the real time that Raspberry Pi became the villain was with their blog post about hiring Toby Roberts that seemed to glorify intrusive covert surveillance, or maybe they became the villain with how they handled negative responses to that blog post. For a more practical complaint, I'm peeved that they don't enable small volume purchasing of the Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2 at a non subsidized price.
That was the last straw for me. Never buying from this company again. They don’t care about the customers that made them popular, they aren’t following their original mission, and now they aren’t aligned with my sense of morality.
I bought a Raspi 1 when it was launched. I was shocked by the arrogant tone of voice on the raspi forum then, and also by the Raspi people themselves. So that was the last Raspi I bought. And in 2016 I switched to a NanoPi NEO 2, for 19 USD ex shipping. I now the only SBC I have, is a RISC-V. Plus two NUCs.
Thanks for showing the Ninja HDR Monitor/Recorder. My colleague and I had been looking for a way to capture boot sequences, BIOS setups, and other things for tutorials for our students. Keep up the great work.
I just bought a new mini pc from lenovo with 16gb ram, 512gb ssd and intel i5 quad core with around 120eur, installed ubuntu on it and I'm not even thinking about pi anymore. The only killer that they still have is the pi pico, which is awesome (btw that's the reason I actually bought the mini pic in the first place, to have it as a dedicated dev environment for pi pico...)
The Pi case problem is a major problem for me. I don't like exposing electronic devices to dust. Many of these Pi cases leave the board loose inside the case.
The Argon cases are some of my favorite. And it's early enough in the Pi 5 lifecycle we'll probably see a few good cases with passive cooling and good enclosures for HATs.
Many of my Pis have no cases - they’re all fine. The only real issue that I’ve had is when I encased a few Pis in these solid Al heat sink style cases: the design left the SD card vulnerable and I broke the SD card slot on them.
There are hundreds of millions of fully encased PCs around the world slowly gathering dust for years without any problems. (Seriously, open up any PC case sand the motherboard is likely covered in dust.) Lacking a case of more of an aesthetic problem than anything else in most cases.
Honestly I would blame you for scaring me with that sponsorship joke, but it honestly felt like a breath of fresh air to see someone poke fun at awful sponsor transitions. You're the fucking savior of my sanity.
I've noticed that on many forums people are buying raspberry pi's for general purpose computing tasks. You hear people say they use it for web browsing, retro gaming, learning how to code Python or run self hosting apps like Home Assistant. Those are things that a x86 mini PC can do (and in some cases, do better, because their iGPU's are way faster and they support NVME storage and expandable RAM) they've never asked whether they'd want to use the Pi- exclusive features (like the easily accessible GPIO pins or pi hats) Because if you do not plan to touch those GPIO pins at all, do not have special connectivity needs or not have the desire to tinker with the hardware, then why even buy a Pi?
Personally for me, it's a good way of just having a desktop that I can directly access the pins for EE breadboarding and other microcontroller shenanigans.
I think a lot of people had a simmilar "journey" as me. I started hosting a few Network Services like Pihole, NAS, ... on a PI 2 where eventually I moved on to a Celeron J3455 NUC which I set up with Proxmox and 16 GB of RAM from which I now moved on to a Ryzen 2700x Server with 64 GB RAM.
xeons golds are going used for ~30/40e now, and dual mobos+~64gb of ram for 'em for ~200. for 300e you can have 48x2 lcpus at home (with that old atx box and a decent psu), that's 1ghz clpu for 1euro :-) rasberry pi's 5 bogomips shoud cost at most 10e compared to that :-)
Hey, I actually ended up using the mini PC you have here for a recent project of mine! I made a personal home intranet system with file sharing services and localhosted websites. Later this week I'll work on some large file transfers onto it. Thanks for posting!
I've used those little Intel boxes to build servers for various things around the house. They're pretty good! I think as Linux boxes i prefer them to the pis. I've had a few pis over the years.
Nowadays we don't need 50% (or more) of the computing power we pack in desktop builds, tbh. We use it only when playing games or encoding something. For anything else those little boxes are more than anyone need. I'm a profesional 2D artist and for my last workstation I just built an itx with a ryzen 5600g. Instead of getting a gpu I added extra ram (art software does not need to move billions of triangles, but it does need ram for the many layers). It's already a few years old, but it packs power for me not to need to upgrade in the next 5 years.
@@Fanaz10this video list that price for a pi 5, this commenter is talking about a pi zero. The pi zero 2 w is currently £20 from amazon and the original pi zero is £5 from pihut
when i first got into pi projects they were extremely affordable and accessible. You could get any form factor you wanted, any model you wanted, any hat you wanted, any accessory you wanted very cheaply, quickly, and easily. Now there are such supply issues that raspberry pis are no longer all that viable. When the pi5 came out it cost close to 500 bucks for one, and while the price has come down they're still hard to get. Accessory availability is also at an all time low.
It really was the Commodore 64 of it's era - Made "for the masses, not the classes" as founder Tramiel said. But Raspberry Pi went the way of the Commodore-Amiga. I suspect they are still around, but make expensive mediocre machines. But even today, Amiga also has it's devoted following.
I think a culmination of factors have knocked the pi off of the top spot. like the chip shortage, and the dropping prices of mini computers. to the point where a raspberry pi makes sense only for niche use cases, like in industry. even if you need the IO pins for a project, in a lot of cases an arduino uno would also be a good substitute.
And ESP32 and Pico shored up many of the low end use-cases, like throwing a Pi in as a little remote monitoring node. Now it's just as easy (if not easier) to get that running with ESPHome or MicroPython, and the microcontrollers use way less power.
@@JeffGeerling They also oblivate much of the need for built-in GPIO on larger systems. A Pico/ESP/STM/AVR/etc hanging off a USB port doing a dedicated task that's controlled and monitored by the larger-scale host is a completely reasonable approach. You can run all the hard realtime tasks on their own controller and not have to ever worry about doing realtime tasks under Linux.
Most of my projects use ESP32 dev boards. I use a Pi as the core, running NodeRed for example. At the moment I’m not using the i/o of a Pi. So I could use a mini-pc. But a Pi Zero 2w is so small I can put it in a box and hide it anywhere convenient. I use a lap-top running Windows to program the ESP32 boards. I tried using a Pi 4b, but it was too difficult. The PC is better as a general purpose computer for me, probably because I don’t need to use anything more than Windows software.
An n100 and a microcontroller gives you a lot more range of operations than a pi for the most part and for less. The big saving grace the pi has is the compute module which allows you to build specialist motherboards for your smaller and more permanently integrated projects
A long time ago. My problem I had with the RasPi4 was trying to use them as a basic computer for the kids during COVID lockdowns. I bought one and tried to use it doing basic things they would need to do. Well it failed, massively. So I bought the 1st Gen GMK NUC for about the same price as the RasPi4 with a case. Guess what, the whole COVID shutdown the kids used those without issues running EndeavourOS (Arch based Linux). They could do zoom, play minecraft, do homework, etc. So unless you have a specific task that has a ARM based program and need the slightly lower power usage then get a Pi. Otherwise save yourself a bunch of headaches and just get a MiniPC you know all the software you need is going to run and video performance will slaughter.
Fun thing I found out with dropping screws, if you just put a hand towel on your desk and put the screws on that when you drop them they almost always stay exactly where you think they went.
Funny. I needed a private servers for few places. So I purchased a few second hand HP G300 Mini's, that are i5 quad-core with 16 GB of RAM and 480 or 960 Gb SSD. I paid each a fair 80 €. The Windows 10 in them I upgraded to Windows 11 (via simple method removing the TPM2 requirement, as I don't encrypt drives with MS partition) and they are idling at 7-8 W consumption when running a simple HTTP/SSH server. On load they are at 9-11W consumption when playing a 4K video from youtube. So off I go and installed Linux, the idling consumtion after few days (as with Windows) was 5.5-6W and on load it was 7-8W. The machines are larger than those about same as combined. But integrated WiFi with good antennas, three DisplayPort, six USB (4x 3.1 and 2x 2.0) and place for a another drive. The downside really is that you need to place somewhere the power unit that is midway of the cable. Oh, and has integrated VESA holes, so you get it straight to display, and bluetooth works great (IIRC v5.0). I as well have been purchasing old Apple laptops, 2009-2012 era. Just get a in good external shape, display intact and keyboard etc, and they will serve very well. This is written on the 2011 Macbook Air 13" that I just replaced the battery. The integrated 4GB RAM is totally limitation, that you can see problematic with Firefox after 40+ tabs open from what 10 are TH-cam, you need to set browser purge cache from old tabs or it will swap hell out... Otherwise, you can render Full HD video at about 30-40 FPS rate, and 4K video even renders at 15 FPS. To say it for a travel laptop it is excellent, and all this for 60€ + 25 for battery. If someone wants low energy computer, these kinds are very low energy users. You don't need a 80-150W PC humming under sesktop with 45-100W monitor attached to it. Raspery Pi died because it became over 25 €. The idea was to be a learning experience for a computer. And now it is better get a Arduino board and just make own small custom smarthome applicants from those.
When the PI 4 came out, I used it for my desktop and I am (or was - I've retired since then) a full-stack professional web developer. It didn't perform like my dual-xeon server but it worked well enough. When work-from-home came around, I did switch to my laptop so I could be more productive for work, but for most people, doing a little bit of typing work, a little bit of email, and a lot of surfing, the PI 4 was great. I didn't even know the PI 5 was out until I watched this video but for all of my electronics work, controlling I/O and custom home control modules, etc., my stack of Pi 2, Pi 3, and Pi4s are doing the job just fine.
I love the pi5 but the market around mini/micro pcs has matured so much since the pi originally hit the market making for some great price competitive alternatives
Their business decisions certainly affected their status with the hobbyist community. As someone who once ran a business, it was understandable... But they still shat on the community that made them. Some will come back, some won't. I think the Pi 5 and it's prices may help heal that divide. As to your case issue.... PiShop High-Pi Pro case with fan on the END of the case.
I don't think the Pi5 will 'heal that divide', the damage is already done and there are now many many alternatives to a Pi that we're using. A high powered Pi is really not needed now when SFF PC's are similar priced and more powerful with Linux. Pi's main advantage was their price, they were almost disposable, but not now.. Now we have to think twice about deploying a Pi or a SFF PC... Added to this Raspberry's blatant abandonment of the community in favor of big business, then no, that divide will not heal. As far as I'm concerned, Raspberry is now just one of many fighting for business with very little USP.
Fully agreed. I actively avoid buying Pi. I exhausted all other options. You said it best. I am not a cynic, so I have not discounted their use, but it is my last choice.
I don't agree that the community made them. The documentation made them. From the beginning the Pi was targeting commercial customers, it's just that when the shortages hit the blinders came off.
I was just doing this kind of math today. Thanks Jeff! The only point I would raise is that you had to write an RpOS image on the nvme, and in the same way you can write a debian installer on a flashdrive and never have to deal with windows on the mini pc.
IMHO the Pi died when those ThinkCentre tiny computers and similar offerings from Dell and HP started getting surplussed onto the market. They are somewhat expandable for their size and much more capable.
IMO, the Pi never really died. The price/performance of the Pi was never there, since from the beginning, you could buy a used Pentium 4 machine off someone for about the same price that would run rings around the Pi 1. The strength of the Pi was the I/O pins, the stability of the software stack, and the documentation. All the clones are missing at least one of the three. The same things that make it attractive to hobbyists (good documentation, stable hardware/software over time, I/O pins) also make it attractive for low-volume businesses. You can't have one without the other, and a business where a Pi makes up $35 of a $3,500 product is going to tolerate a lot higher prices than a hobbyist because it still saves them $100/hr development time.
Dont get me wrong. I can't argue that I have learned a lot from Cisco Charles, But I feel like i could take a cross country roadtrip with Mr. Geerling here and not want to leap from the car half way. The truth is i learn just as must IT here!! you're the man, please keep it up you're very appreciated!
![สาวเมืองเพชร - ธีเดช ทองอภิชาติ [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kEt7F9PvO3I/mqdefault.jpg)
The problem is that you can wipe the Windows and install any free and open-source Linux distro on N100 mini PC. Intel's mainline Linux support has always been top-notch.
If the total cost for the machine with 8GB of ram and a 512 GB SSD is $135 dollars they didn't rob you at all, the cost of Windows license for Tiny PCs is almost nothing@@dinckelman
@@dinckelman that's why you learn to build from spares
@@dinckelmanNot if you buy the barebones version, then supply your own ssd and ram.
@@dinckelman That license would have been peanuts. I imagine it's via one those mass volume licences that you can pick up off eBay for $2.
This. Also prox mox install on here and you’re off to the races. If you want a real pi experience get a pico.
The magic about the pi was the price around $35. Once it rose sky high, comparisons like yours had to be made.
especially when for a lot of people it wasnt the type of tinkering which a single board pc often is designed around, it was the affordability and convinience to purchase
When mini pcs started properly flooding the market in the last few years, and at prices not all desimilar to the raspberry pi in the early days, mixed with the raspberry pi shortage, only people wanting what the single board computers were designed around desparately sought them out,
Meanwhile people who either just wanted to tinker about with linux, have a small computer, or things that dont really relate to the hardware of the rpi, just bought either these mini pcs from amazon or the second hand ones that buisnesses flooded the market with at this point.
Too expensive for a simple gadget and too weak for some useful applications (paired with an ARM CPU too)...
I remember when it came out it was never that cheap. More like $50 something. I remember it distinctly because I bought a much more powerful ARM microcontroller dev board with lots of breakout for like $9 LOL
@@The_Conspiracy_AnalystWhich one did you buy? Like was the 9 dollar microcontroller
@@comedyreliefguy5112 I actually found it the other day. It was a 2" square board with USB and a breakout for GPIO. I think it was an ARM9. Just a generic china board
You have to remember why the Raspberry Pi was created in the first place. As a tool for schools, children and the like, which earned the company charitable status. Upton decided to prioritise business's but did not relinquish the charitable status, which he clearly abused in making the decision. So it is not the Pi itself that may have become something of a villain but the creator.
Lol, a bit melodramatic dude.
@@Design_nowhen you built a brand name from the community that maximizes it's use and then betray that community by making it unaffordable for small projects, he's clearly betraying the people who made Pi so big to begin with.
@@Design_no mofo's gatekeeping emotions
Dance with the one who brought you. Raspberry Pi betrayed the customer base that built their entire company from nothing. But apparently there was a prettier girl at the shindig.
@@Design_nobud if your local food bank started giving the food you donated to rich people so they could sell marke it up and sell it to poor people yould be pissed.
But no when they take the money we thought was going to kids its okay
"Is it a good time to Segway to a sponsor?"
*reaches for the mouse*
"no it's not"
*resumes listening* :D
sponsorblock ;)
i literally did that exact movement lmao
stop reading my mind >:(
*segue
For me it was definitely during the shortage when every content creator and their mother had seemingly endless access to whatever they wanted so they could show off cool projects that no normal consumer could hope to replicate unless they spent exorbitant prices to scalpers.
"Here's my 128 node Raspberry Pi cluster with 500 TB of storage that I built out of spare parts and 8 4080TI GPUs while using the money from my newspaper route..."
@@chrisnelson414 And its performance is still not nearly as good as a Mini PC at half that price
all i wanted was a cm4 with 8gb… 😂 yeah, all of the above.
And Jeff was one of them. But he got them for free. I’m a subscriber from his Ansible days. I haven’t unsubscribed, but that rubbed me the wrong way and I don’t watch most of his videos anymore.
This was it for me. It became a content creator's computer and not a hobbyist's computer.
Most of the "issues" with the N100 box were issues with windows, not the hardware itself, put debian on it for a decently fair comparison. For reference, my N100 box, which is very similar to the one here, idles at around 4-5W, not as good as the pi, but much better than with windows.
Also I think we're kinda missing the point of an SBC here, for general desktop computing, an SBC is always gonna be a poor value. The strength of the pi and other SBCs is their IO. They're great for projects where you need to interface with the real world through sensors, actuators, indicators, and non-USB user inputs. If you're building a robot that needs potentiometers on each joint, position sensors, and status LEDs, then use a pi, that's what it's made for. If you want a small, portable, low power desktop, get a mini PC, that's what they're made for.
That's why I'm not a big fan of the Pi 5, it just doesn't really fit anywhere, it's too expensive to casually embed into a project, but not powerful enough for a good desktop experience. It's cool to have the capabilities of a Pi 5, but how many situations actually need GPIO pins AND 8GB of RAM? The niche case of moderately high-end robotics that actually has those requirements has long since been filled the Jetson nano stuff (granted, the pi is a fair bit cheaper). It just doesn't have much a real place.
I was wondering that the test was a bit unfair considering Windows has a lot of junk running in the background that it would use more energy to run.
Also, on a fresh Windows install, it does lots of stuff in the background. Windows could be more power efficient than Linux at times(for example in Laptops)
Yeah, I thought that was a bit disingenuous on Jeff's part. Getting something like an Ubuntu image on a USB drive and booting the 'live CD' version is less work than getting the OS image installed on the NVMe SSD.
If you want a slick windows which doesn't run a lot of trash at background, you can always "sail overseas", and get some enterprise/LTSC version of the OS, and go for Win10, not 11. You still get almost all advantages of Windows, including WSL, with no one of the drawbacks of the "consumer" versions.
If the goal is to interface with the real world for sensors and outputs, then a Pi running a GPOS (General Purpose Operating System) is really not the best option anyway. the ESP32 with it's RTOS (Real Time Operating System) is far better suited to the task, and they are cheap as chips too...
ESP ate Raspberries lunch, and their lack of supply and rising prices don't make that any easier. Perhaps the Pi is already on its trajectory to becoming a defacto embedded GPOS within business PIC systems, the very market that was getting supplies when the rest of us were put on hold by Raspberry for nearly 3 years. That decision combined with the introduction of the ESP32 will doom the Pi for tinkerers which form the backbone of the Pi community, that in itself is the very reason commercial customers even looked at the Pi in the first place...
One of feature that he missed in the video is that You can upgrade the RAM to 32GB for the N100 Mini.
But you're stuck with 8GB RAM on Pi
The OPi 5 is the best at bringing price/ ram/ and proformance as it can come with 32gb of ram as well as faeturing a NPU.
yeah I noticed that as well but I have 64 GB DDR4 paired with an I7 K 10th gen, and there aren't many use cases where the CPU isn't the limiting factor. I know it's a laptop and the heat is the source of the issue but I imagine the mini PC would run into similar issues. I just don't see a case where something with less computing power than an i3 can use 32 GB. maybe 16 gb for a tab hoarder but I think that is still likely to crash from the CPU being over-extended in some capacity. but maybe I'm wrong after all I have no experience with the mini PC.
@@weirdwarlock625honestly you're wrong in terms of cooling because laptops have to consider thickness as a limiting factor and mini PC doesn't so it can fit larger fans and even faster fan if they want to. Cooling isn't an issue, especially if it isn't a laptop running high end CPU on a Intel generation known for generating lots of heat.
I have an old laptop that I stuck a big RAM in it and it runs really well. Unless you're playing all 4k video on 20 tabs, it won't chug down. It takes very little, almost negligible power to keep one tab running, and it doesn't render anything on screen so it's not even taxing to the system at all. Modern browser also freeze tabs that aren't in use.
@@weirdwarlock625as a tab hoarder, I don't agree that 16GB is enough. Crashed many times.32G is a different story.
@DarkExternalHeart perhaps my laptop is dirty, I was only speaking to my personal experience. I've usually encountered thermal throttling before maxing out ram with my 64 gb setup and usually hover around 35 gb usage with about 500 chrom tabs open.
Maybe your laptop has better cooling than mine. I have a msi GF 75 thin 10.
My takeaway from this is that computing is so cheap nowadays! My first PC cost $1500 and had only a fraction of the CPU and storage of any of the machines shown. Now I have mini PCs, several Pis and even an old HP refurb from Amazon that lived out its life computing spreadsheets on someone's desk. I run various different OSs, have networks set up as a playground. When I started as a programmer I used to go into work at the weekends just so I could play with the hardware in the machine room, now I have all that and more sitting around my den at home.
I remember when I was in my teens in the 90's my dad got a 5GB HDD and it's echoed in my hear ever since "I don't know how I'd use all this". I have 6TB in my desktop right now, I was cleaning the other week and found a 1TB m.2 drive just hanging out at the bottom of a pile of cords lol
I remember the days when a $4000 PC got you 2MB of RAM. Oh, the days. And $4000 was a cheap price compared to some others!
@@WillSams In the mid nineties for "only" $2000 I got a pentium 75 hotrod of it's day. Then they invented these fancy fangled things video cards we called them. It was like a computer you put in your computer. Hey I hear you like computers let's put 2 more computers in your computer and link them up. We called that crossfire and all the cool kids wanted to do it.
I bought a Time computer with Windows Millennium(LOL) on it in 1999 for £1000
My first bought wass a 8086 xt with 64 kb on mobo rest up to 256 kb was on daughterboard. My FIRST pc I build my self, it was a Zilog Z80A totalling around $3000 plus case, keyboard and 8" floppy station, full decked out with 2 floppy and a blistering CGA monitor it was something like $1000-1400
With the Pi's price increase (yes yes I know you can technically still get one for $35 but certainly not a Pi 5), and the need to buy so many extras it's become pretty pointless to use it as a dedicated machine when mini pc's are so cheap now. Even the older Thinkcentres which can be picked up sub $100 on ebay far outstrip it in performance. I wouldn't say the Pi is a villain, but it's certainly no longer the go-to solution, not even close to it.
The shortage certainly didn't help, nor did some of their very sketchy and questionable behaviour on social media (their incredibly hostile and rude responses to people on twitter and their own forums being a prime example, they still ban new users for asking genuine questions just because they don't like hearing them) helped push people away from wanting to work with them.
I think they've just evolved. They are no longer the loveable opensource, friendly community focused product maker. They're a corporation who realised B2B was vastly more profitable, and the hobbyist market has become very much secondary. They slowed down on the push into education massively over the last couple of years to the point where they don't really seem to be interested in it anymore so it's not too surprising.
A lot of that is because there's basically no reason to cover the educational sector in that way. Schools don't teach electronic fundamentals much any more
Biden flation and pissed off world not helping
@@Ornithopter470schools don't do but anti social propaganda. Reality is counter productive to a marxist
The thing I kinda miss with older Pis is the "you already have most of what you need" ethos. You already have a phone charger, you already have a USB keyboard and mouse, you probably already have an HDMI monitor, and if you don't you can just use your TV, and there's a good chance you can borrow an SD card from something. I know better hardware is more power hungry, but it seems to have lost the kid friendly idea of buying a computer with your pocket money and not needing anything else to get started. Now you have to get a special power supply and a special display cable, and maybe a special case to keep it cool.
i absolutely hate that they switched to micro HDMI adapters. now you have to not only buy a proprietary charger but you also have to buy a proprietary video cable to use the thing. not to mention needing a fan or cooling system to even play video without throttling.
@@jimster1111Nah, you can use several different things to power them. Like just your average fast charge USB-C cable that comes with any Android based phones, as long as it's plugged into a fairly decent Charging brick that meets the however many watts they require, or...you can buy the official charging brick cable with a built-in On/off toggle switch into the cable so you don't have to manually unplug the cable to cut power to it. They're only about $20 max for the official power supply cable.
And...I completely forgot about my buddy who runs Raspberry Pi's in a server stack and they are all powered using PoE (Power over Ethernet). Where both your network connection and enough power to supply each Raspberry Pi all coming through the Ethernet port.
(I would say iPhone 15's USB-C cables as well....but Apple is so shady they just kept using the EXACT same physical cables that they've been using for a decade+ for lighting cables, but just put a USB-C connection on the end instead of a lightning port....which are all USB 2.0 speeds)
The Pi 5 doesn't come with Power Delivery, so a standard phone charger won't work. I've tried.
I'm mostly surprised they didn't use a more compliant USB-PD protocol chip to take advantage of all the USB PD power bricks out there, they decided to use one that requires 5V/5A which is technically compliant but not usually supported. The HDMI adapter is annoying than anything else.
yea but maybe you want better hardware (more recent pi) because you need better performance. Like if you're doing image recognition with the Pi while controlling multiple sensors and servos
the pi 5 defeats the point of the pi imo
Good old pi3a still cheap and available.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W fills that role
Kind of. The point of the pi was to be a low power mirco controller based PCB with 40 GPIO pins not a desktop replacement. The pi 3B+ and pi 4 kind of went to the performance needed to be a good low cost low power general use desktop replacement.
How? Its $35-$40, same as RasPi 4. They just can't release 1GB and 2GB models until the 4/8 quantity is sufficiently scalped.
@@yumri4 it was intended for young people in developing and low income families to learn to program.
Also, as a former dell service technician for laptops: get a magnet mat with a grid on it, to keep those pesky screws in place. Also helps with remembering in what order you took them off, though that's less of a problem with this few screws.
the last thing you should be doing is magnetizing your hardware
In Australia, today's price for a Pi5 without the hat, using a micro SD, with all the other bits is $214. At the same time, an 8Gig ram, 128G ssd windows 10 PC from Amazon is $158. We are a long way from the originally touted benefits of a $35 computer (which it never was here anyway).
You my friend have a corrupt incompetent Govt that is purposefully stealing from you at a clip that would make Stalin proud.
Pis are overpriced here anyway
But the Windows 10 PC doesn't have GPIO.
bro where are you getting that 214 from. $160 on core electronics. def not a better deal than any mini pc but $214 is insane
@@expression3639It does, it just requires you to rtfm to use them. In a stroke of extreme irony, NUCs have ended up being the cheaper and "hacker friendly" option where if you are prepared to learn some things about how computers work, you get a really cool machine for tinkering, while Pi has become the corporation that's grown inefficient and fat by cornering the education market where teachers force schools or students to pay inflated prices for mediocre hardware and nicely graphically designed boxes and accessories.
www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/boardsandkits/custom-solutions-header-whitepaper.pdf
Raspberry pi kinda had a mission statement. They wanted to make these cheap and readily available so that people would get interested in the hobby. At first, it worked. I got my first kit for $55 and I've been tinkering with computers ever since. We all know what happened after that with prices and availability. But I can honestly say that I'm thankful for what they did.
I would have liked to see them work towards also creating a set of standards that would enable all their work on the software and OS side to be used on a wider range of ARM SBCs. During the shortage software was always the biggest issue with any of the boards that advertised themselves as alternatives or clones. It was often extremely difficult to much with them because they couldn't run the software needed to build on something that had already been done on the RasPi.
PCs solved this issue decades ago and I wish the ARM ecosystem could do the same.
Then came the industrialists came along and bought massive quality. Then the bread crumbs that were left were gobbled up by scalpers with their 30% markup. Which means zero availability for regular plebes!!
@@splynncryth I honestly think they would've switched over to RISC-V since the actual instruction set can be completely open source with no locked out blobs like on ARM (see what companies like Atmel and Nvidia do to fuck over OEMs).
Pi still sell a $35 B. And a $17 Zero 2W. And a $5 Pico.
People talking as if that’s changed. It hasn’t.
Pi has got cheaper relative to inflation.
I belive the RPi pico is more of the focus for hobbist as the raspi A and B seem to get caught up in a mountian of problems. From scalpers to python code that does not work. It would be cool though if for the hobbist the RPi team beefed up the RPi zero and stuck it at a $20 price point.
The key point here is "if you're looking for a desktop computer". Pis have _never_ excelled at this role (despite frequent claims to the contrary), and have been downright abysmal at it up until the Pi 5. You get a Pi because you have specific connectivity needs or you're using it embedded or for a special purpose, not just because you want a "cheap desktop".
The GMKtec is a pretty slick little unit though, thanks for showcasing it!
Bingo, bingo, bingo. Came here to say the exact same thing.
A Pi is not a particularly good desktop PC and there's very little reason to try and use one as such. I don't understand why everybody who reviews Pi products immediately jumps into a desktop GUI environment and starts trying to watch TH-cam videos. What the Pi excels at is being small (especially in the CM form factor), having GPIO for interfacing with various sensors and actuators, and being embeddable - including being able to run without a dedicated fan in many configurations.
I really can't understand why anybody would buy a Raspberry Pi for video editing, or watching 4K video, etc. But to each his own. "Different strokes for different folks" and all that.
@PhillipRhodes RPI 5 is not powerful enough to be a desktop 4k video viewer... but it's got too much power for running sensors and actuators or a PIHole. RPI 3 could do it.
@@habafflofYes! Exactly this. If it’s not a good desktop, stop adding more display connectors, and stop using beefy GPUs that drive power consumption through the roof while bringing no benefit for headless users. If it’s designed to be a desktop pc, then put normal display connectors on it instead of a strange connector no one uses, and put all the ports on one side!
@@PhillipRhodes I agree, but the inverse is equally true: I don't understand why someone would spend $130+ when they could get a mini pc with better specs for double digits and just buy a $15 USB to GPIO. Cheap, and modular let us roll the dice on an I2c bit bang that might fry the board or solve a problem in a cool way. Who's doing that with $130? Not me. So who is the intended consumer? What is the intended trajectory? Personally, I'm worried it's going from Acorn computer to Apple.
@@explocevoyou could buy a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W for $5 and solder on the header pins, or get one with headers on there already for a bit more. Also, you can run the Pico on its own once programmed. Even the USB to GPIO header is expensive compared to a Pico.
raspberry pi: let's make something for hobbiests
also raspberry pi: let's prioritize businesses over hobbiests.
I laughed out loud at "Nobody is sponsoring this video. Everything you see here I bought, thanks to this channel's... sponsors."
GitHub Sponsors, more specifically ;) The wording is funny now that I hear it :D
I thought it was on purpose. That was pretty funny
@@JeffGeerling Don't threaten me with a sponsor lol.
Ha, completely on accident@@lewisse_8966
@@JeffGeerling I understood it from the video. It was money that could have been spent elsewhere.
Love the part where he says "is it a good time to segue to a sponsor? No, it's not". I like this presenter's style, goes into enough detail without overdoing it.
I've been tinkering with both Raspberry Pi and low power Intel boards for a few years. I've found fitness for usage depends on what you want to do with it. I've had a PLEX server running on a low powered Intel Celeron processor for several years.
I reached for my mouse to scrub forward. Psyched out!
Sponsorblock extension is your friend.
That was my original pi project was plex server. There was something wrong with either the power supply or mini hdmi when plugged in every few seconds there'd be an audible click and it would drive me crazy.
They made a case for raspberry pi's and didn't call it crust?? The marketing team dropped the ball on this one.
Or the pi tin
@CCherriosful The backlash has caused them to make some changes. The rollout of the Pi5 is a vast improvement. But yeah, the only reason they are doing this is because DIY guys were jumping ship enmasse.
Pi Shell?
"Some assembly required"
The DIY nature of the Pi is not a negative at all IMO. In fact, it's to a large degree the very point.
A part of the use-case of these devices since its inception is to teach children/people about computing and electronics.
Making people navigate through relevant conventions, standards, processes, and procedures to do things gives them a logic and intuition for computers, and problem-solving skills that would simply not be there if all it was was a plug-and-play solution. And for experienced people, the assembly is either enjoyable, or so easy that it's no trouble at all.
The DIY nature and requirement of Pi's is a good thing.
Correct. It's a feature, not a bug. The barrier to entry is relatively low, as low as it can be for what is designed to be accessible at the bare-metal level. But it's intentionally _not_ a black box that "just works." If that's what you want, buy a computer. They both exist in parallel, and one isn't mutually exclusive of the other.
Agreed 100%!
Interesting to watch how, over time, the Raspberrypi has moved from being a STEM part emphasizing the GPIO functionality, to being a small computer that you can sometimes hook stuff to.
Yeah, the biggest change that bothered me was the microHDMI ports so they can handle two displays. If you are trying to run two monitors from a Pi, you are doing it wrong. I want the single full size HDMI port back.
If only all the people that were using it as a mini PC to run docker and all sorts of stuff that can run on a mini PC were buying mini PCs instead
@@marcogenovesi8570most people don't need that much power, and want a well-known well-documented device
@@QualityDoggo so a mini-pc isn't a well-known and well-documented device for you?
As for the computing power, who cares, it's cheaper and idles at similar power draw
Most of the projects that I would have used a Pi to make I now use a Pi Nano. Even though the hardware is limited the price can't be beat ($10 w/BT; $5 w/o). I can make a lot of neat projects (digital thermometer, soil moisture monitor, keyboard expansion, etc) that won't break the bank and won't be overkill as it would be for something like the Pi 5.
I was on rpi4 for a long time until I jumped to N100 a few months ago. The first thing i did was to wipe windows and install ubuntu.
It turns out the N100 is MUCH more capable than rpi4, especially on HW encoding. I can finally burn subtitles in jellyfin real-time!
Thumbs up for wiping Windows and installing Ubuntu :)
@@JeffGeerling It's what you should have done in your test to make it fair....
even the ryzen 2200ge mini pcs great for under 100$
Same here, a N100 with dual 2.5GiB lan, multi sata and 1 ssd nvme m2 is the same price that a RP5...
@@dougle03 I guess certain drivers and settings may have had a small amount of effect.. Though not by much. You would have had the same or a small bit more performance if you switched the N100 to linux.
This depends on the distro, DesktopEnvironment/WindowManager settings, drivers installed, default kernel settings, and etc.. Not all distros are created equally, some run on an older kernel vs some running newer kernels; Release types: [Stable, LTS, Fixed, Semi-Rolling, Rolling]. I'm probably missing a few things here, but I think that's the main bits or hurdles.
The raspberry pi foundation became the villain for two reasons. During the shortage they rubbed many hobbyists face in it when they announced they were going against their own objectives. And decided to supply business customers over end users. Then hiring a surveillance cop. And blocking people when the pointed out issue.
Not just blocking people but outright mocking them!
I would not buy another pi simply based on the spy cop shenanigans
They had this kind of practices way before. It's just that fewer people had been on the receiving end.
Being an electronic designer, I would say it is rarely DIY is cheaper than buying, so pricing was not a surprise, but the excitement in DIY is in general worth the difference :).
It's also pretty ridiculous to compare a brand new SBC with a mini-PC that has probably been used for 5 years by a corporate entity that has complete depreciated its value and is dumping it on the 2nd-hand market for whatever spare change they can get for it.
It's like comparing a value meal from a fast food joint to a can of beans on the clearance shelf of a supermarket, and complaining about how much your burger cost.
(EDIT: To be clear, this is regarding frequent comments about picking up an HP or Dell mini PC for less, not the particular Intel thing here. That is a whole other ball of wax, namely the economies of scale of a behemoth like Intel when they want to drop a 0% margin product because they can.)
Yeah, that goes for about everything.
You really only do diy/custom builds if you like doing that stuff.
Aside from the reliability in finding non-scalped Pis, I think they moved into a pricing segment where you could get more compatible, flexible, powerful options for a tiny bit more. Why go through the trouble of stringing together a bunch of hats and accessories when for about $120 you can get a well-capable N100? Raspberry Pis are in the uncomfortable stage where they either need to offer something more powerful than the N100 or double down on better/cheaper versions of lower segment offerings. More powerful or feature rich Pi Zeros, for instance.
Or buy Orange Pi 5 which has superior Rockchip RK3588 on 8nm Samsung process (RPI5 is on old 16nm). Basically same CPU Cortex A76 as RPI5 however RK3588 has also additional 4x Cortex A55 Little cores which gives excellent 1 W idle power consumption and higher MT performance. Also RK3588 uses original ARM Mali GPU (much better performance and drivers than home-brew RPI5 Videocore something) and as last thing RK3588 has NPU for AI acceleration with 1 TOPs (which RPI5 lacks entirely).
And Orange Pi 5 is cheaper, available and has M2 SSD port bult-in as standard. Also has 16GB and 32GB RAM options. And OPI5 Plus version has 2x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports which can run as home router. Orange Pi 5 is new SBC king rather then just cheap alternative RPI5.
@@richard.20000 orange pi is 200$ you kidding?
@@richard.20000 And the Orange Pi 5 has a 3.5mm audio socket.
@@richard.20000Orange Pi boards have historically been poorly supported on the software side, and models come and go on a whim. If it's just faster hardware and more features that you want, fair enough. If you require regular software updates and guarantees on long term support, you may find them lacking. There's a reason why the Raspberry Pi outsells the Orange Pi.
Yeah, they've become more powerful, but just shitty enough work heavier tasks that leaves you wanting more.
For me the Pi Pico has now become what the original Raspberry Pi was to me, it’s cheap and barebones with some IO. I actually have to do some engineering to get things to run on the limited resources it offers which I find part of the fun.
Yup, and finally there's meaningful USB libraries (via TinyUSB library) and useful code examples. The Pico can give a standard PC GPIO and A-D pretty easily.
And you can get it working with ESPHome, Pico is a great little device!
With the Pico plugged into a VGA or DVI/HDMI board with writable SD Card and Basic it becomes the thing that the Pi vision was described as originally: a machine like the BBC, C64, etc. that a kid could turn on, boot immediately and enter a learning environment (the Basic REPL). This exists now if a techy adult can put the pieces together for the kid. Personally, I'd replace the Basic interpreter with a Micropython REPL as it's a better language for a child to start with in the 21st centaury but I don't believe the software pieces are there yet for Micropython to self host a write / run / debug loop on the device directly, but there is no reason it couldn't.
I dabble in modifying old consoles and the pi pico is a revolution in the mod chip scene. What were once $80-100 mod chips are now $10-20. So many talented people are producing new firmware because these chips are easily accessible and the hobbyist community is so active and documents things well. We are even seeing the pico chip integrated into pcbs with flex ribbons for easy installation. And there's basically no supply shortages unlike proprietary mod designs of yore given that many follow open source principles
Comparing the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico is like comparing apples and oranges. The Raspberry Pi has an applications processor while the Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller.
I like the part where Jeff says the N100's 40-50% higher Geekbench scores are "a bit faster."
Well, I had expected the N100 would be at least 3-5 times faster. So I agree with Jeff it was only a bit faster.
this is what happens when you get paid by pi organization.
We also have no idea if Windows was done with updates, indexing, etc. As another commenter said, throw Linux on there and then compare if you want an equitable comparison.
I’ll side with “‘50% faster’ isn’t that much”. Doubly-so when it’s using a lot more than +50% power to do it.
not paid. He pays them. its sunk cost fallacy.@@VolkanTaninmis
Good luck with the not-dropping-a-screw mission. I've never been able to beat that one yet either and I've been doing DIY electronics for 45+ years. Great video!
My first Pi cost $35, didn't need a fan or heat sink, and used an old USB phone charger (so free) for the power source. At first I used a couple of hand bent and drilled squares of Lexan for a "case" (eventually, cases got cheaper). It performed its automation job for all that time, until being retired a few years ago to a farm upstate (I'm told). My alternative at the time would have been a compact PC that would cost a lot more (even used), was the size of a couple of laptops stacked up, needed mains power to the case, consumed a lot of that power, had a noisy fan, and booted from a mechanical hard-drive. It WAS a no-brainer, but now the industry is very different. The Pi isn't a villain, it's a victim of evolving technology, and economies of scale.
If the Pi didn't exist, it's possible that companies wouldn't have noticed the value of mini-PCs and the market not be flooded with them now. I believe the Pi helped drive the industry to where it is today.
@@samyaspapathat's a really good take. Hadn't thought of that.
@samyaspapa - I absolutely agree! The Pi showed the possibility (and popularity) of a minimal system and then (just bad timing) went into hibernation. When people will pay >$300 for something that was $35, the market notices, and will pivot. The problem now is that Pi is chasing a market they can't compete with. I have yet to buy a 5, and I don't know if I will. I'd rather have a 3 with a little more memory, a little more performance, and less power and heat of the 4 & 5. Maybe Gb Ethernet and USB 3. If I want a small, fast Linux system, I'll buy one of these micro PCs and do an install.
You are not aware, but you alternative was ESP8266 or ESP32. As a person that came from microcontrollers before SBC, I never understood Raspberry Pi
@@samyaspapa Yup. It's like Starbucks: They serve shitty, burnt coffee in their soulless, generic, consummately-corporate shops ... but without them, decent coffee shops wouldn't exist in North America.
I'd say it's when the social media account of the manufacturing side attacked and blocked people for simply asking why they hired a former surveillance officer to a higher position in their company.
That's when they became the villain in my circles, too. The guy boasted about building surveillance gear out of raspberry pis and how much fun it was. When was that ever going to be received positively?
So much this.
yuge if true
@@burtburtist it happened about a year ago on both Twitter and Mastodon. Maybe 2 years ago. What is time anymore anyway?
@@JouvaMoufette time is a kind of weird soup
The real problem with Raspberry Pi is just their availability.
Their popularity still means that they are the best choice in most cases, none of the alternatives have it's community support.
It's just that they seem incapable at scaling their production to the demand of their product.
Each model seems to have had this issue at launch... but most of them eventually hit a steady state. The Pi 4 was the first to achieve that equilibrium-then the shortages hit.
The CM4 and Pi Zero 2 W were both almost never available, relative to their lifespan, and are only now available in quantity :(
Hopefully the Pi 5 will overcome the supply/demand shock soon-I certainly hope the CM5 will come out of the gate better than CM4.
Well after COVID it seems to be that any new popular device,chip, MOSFET etc gets an early availability issue
Over builting production line will have consciousness later on
It depends on your use case. For desktop, this micro PC is much better. You can install any Linux distro on it and upgrade it for many years. The Pi is better for experimenting with and IoT.
X64 hardware is sufficiently interchangeable, that you will have good driver support and don't get many issues ARM SBCs other than the Pi can be a mess though.
A Pi is probably still a good recommendation to someone who is very new to the field and the best for some use cases. But if you just need a low power server, just get a miniPC.
eeeeeyyyyyyy
“Just kidding there is no sponsor “ 5 seconds later “I bought this thanks to my patrons and sponsors “
"Is it a good time to segway to a sponsor? No, its not" hilarious. Love it.
Hi Jeff, the little metal bar you wondered about is a VESA mount so you can put the mini-PC on the back of the monitor. Then you have an all-in-one computer. 😉
Technically all in two, but joined at the hip!
@@JeffGeerling With enough hot-glue, any two things can become one!
This is true @@JuryDutySummons
On of the biggest selling points for me are the GPIO ports. With a Raspberry Pi you get a computer that also works as a full fledged microcontroller. In that aspect, it's just wonderful
You can buy a usb gpio port expander for 30 bucks. Problem solved.
@@originalmianos Yeah, of course, but that just defeats the purpose of a cheap pc+microcontroller. I buy used raspberry pi's for 15-20€
@@adriabruicortes490 Raspberry Pi also has nothing to do with cheap pc+microcontrollers anymore.
@@antagonista8122
That is why i buy gen 1-2 pi-s, they are dirt cheap (you can find 1rst gen for 5$), and they are still functioning pretty well with CLI systems. In bonus i found them more stable than rp4/5, they need less power (one of them is literally running from the USB-port of my router), and again, they are dirt cheap. You don't need the power of a pi5 for an MCU(especially with all the crap you need for it, 5A power supply and cables will get it anywhere but to the place you want to actively use a gpio at), there are better solutions for that.
@@adriabruicortes490 thats not what pi is for, get an arduino clone
the path of raspi is a prime example of what happens when a business puts its head up its own ass
RPi started with hobbyists. Now they cater to corporations like Samsung, LG, Sharp, etc. who are putting RPi CM4's into commercial TVs used for marketing signage, etc. There's a ton of other corporate companies buying up RPi and all this contributed to the shortages the last few years because RPi gave those corporate customers priority. This made is next to impossible to source the best CM4's and RPi4's. I bought a couple TuringPi v2 cluster boards, couldn't obtain any CM4's (at least the SKUs I wanted). Finally TuringPi released their RK1 RockChip compatible with RPi4. The RK1 is better than the CM4 and I don't need a daughter board to put it into the TuringPiv2 and they sold big heatsinks with fans.
maybe if you tell them you're gonna buy 10k in 2 months and need some samples? 😆 Sound concerned about them being able to meet demand
Those marketing signages are shit too and cause accidents. They're bright as fuck and distract drivers it's bad for road safety.
It makes sense though. A commercial buyer like that, buying in bulk, will have an agreement for guaranteed delivery of the requested quantity and the requested time, with penalties for failing. So if supplies are short, Raspberry Pi Trading must prioritise meeting their contractual obligations to those customers.
And those customers like the Pi and CM4 because it's very well supported and low cost.
@@alvaros8769 "I buy 10k now" (to scalp,. but I don't need to tell them). So scalpers get priority (as the miners and scalpers did in the times of the GPU shortage).
@@vylbird8014 It's RPT's decision to enter those contracts. You can't *make* someone enter such a contract.
I don’t think it was just SBC which stole Pi 4/5’s lunch. ESP32’s also became very popular, cheap and incredibly versatile. ESPHome made them very easy to configure compared to the days of .ino files.
True-plus the Pico and Zero 2 W eating the low end on Pi's own side.
Absolutely. ESP32 devices are absolute gems. Love them 💯
ESP32 have been ruling over Arduinos too. ESP32 Master Race
Especially the esp32c3 version. Yes its a bit different in terms of specs, but they often gets below $1.5
@@JeffGeerling There is a gap between the Pico and the PO. I can't wait until they fill it with something, be it more variants of the RP2040 (with more RAM) or a Coretex M3 or even M7, maybe something like a combination of the RP1 and the RP2040.
If you drop screws on the ground, put a flashlight on the ground to cast long horizontal shadows from any little speck on the floor. Makes it so much easier to find things.
Or utilize a magnet, even though we still haven't figured out how they work
Don’t do this if you have young kids and pets because all you’ll find is the horror show of fur, hair, and crumbs blanketing the floor you thought was clean.
@@hamothemagnif8529 Every time I have to find a screw I find out how my carpet is not as clean as I think it is.
Have you tried talking to a scientist?
That works, or put a small magnet near the tip of your screwdriver to catch any screws as they come out.
I got a magnetic pad, it's about the size of a mousepad, and you can set a screw down on it and it stays put. It has grid lines so you can put the screws down and remember where they go.
Four things:
1) With the GMKtec, you can, of course, always wipe the Windows 11 install and install Linux as well. (or just swap the drive if you want to keep the Windows license key)
2) Speaking of the Windows license key, if you subtract that from the cost of the GMKtec mini PC.
3) If you compute the performance/$/Watt, the answer my surprise you.
4) It REALLY depends on what you want to do with the systems. Proxmox on ARM is still technically experimental.
You don't get license keys stuck on the case anymore. You don't even get the key if its OEM.
The license key is stored in UEFI if it's pre-installed so when you reinstall you won't need to enter it when you reinstall. Even if you purchase a key after it's tied to that mainboard/uefi so it won't need to be reactivated.
@@AndrewMurphy1
Depends on specific implementation.
Not all Mini PCs are set up this way.
For my Beelink GTR5 5900HX, I just emailed them what's my key and they sent it to me via email.
But later on, I learned that there is actually a method where you can READ the key that's currently used/installed, so as long as you "read"/"export" that, and save that to a file, then I can skip emailing them.
@@ewenchan1239 No, it is in the UEFI. It's part of the requirements Microsoft forces on OEMs.
@@AngelaTheSephira
That's actually NOT always entirely true.
Depending on which Mini PC you've purchased, if one of the first things that you do is to extract the default Windows key, and then wipe the drive -- per your comment, you would THINK that's how it works, but that's not always necessarily how it actually works, in reality.
Ask me how I know this.
@@ewenchan1239 If the key is in the UEFI, then it never had an OEM license and was pirated from the factory.
The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering. An N100 will destroy the Pi in raw specs but not necessarily be the best educational tool. My parents got me a Raspberry Pi 1B for Christmas over a decade ago and I’m so thankful for the learning the Pi ecosystem has provided me.
For servers I run low power Dells but if I ever have kids they’re getting Pi’s!
The Pi ecosystem stopped being educational when the foundation concentrated on add-ons, more ram, cpu cycles and industrial components. It's now nothing like what Upton said was needed, wanted or would be built.
A decade ago there was nothing to beat a low power Pi...
Id rather use a raspberry pi than anything with a Intel CPU 😂
'The Pi’s main strength is education and tinkering.'
Not once they decide to cover the industrial market for more money without also pumping out the few extra to satisfy said educational and tinkering market.
@@infernaldaedra Why?
THe odd bracket is actually a VESA mount, according to the specs/sales page. Pretty common on the micro-form factor PCs.
Yeah, I have been using the VESA mounts on PCs where I work. It's GREAT!
Ya, but to be fair to jeff, one would expect a VESA mount to be square. The first time I saw that bracket I didn't know it was VESA compatible until I read the manual.
@@pity4279 Such a tiny thing only needs the top two screws on a standard vesa mount im guessing. Great to be able to put it behind you monitor, though have to have an easy way to turn the thing on.
This video was timely. Just last week I decided I'm done with the Pi. There's tons of applications that it's perfect for, but it just doesn't suit my emulation needs anymore. I have a Pi 4 running Retropie and it was alright a few years ago when I finished the project, but now that mini pcs are at this price point they're just the best option. I wanted to do this again with the Pi 5, but it's just too much trouble for too little return. Supply shortages, a world of crappy cases that don't fit my needs, waiting months or years for the Retropie team to cobble together a stable build, poor performance...I bought the exact same GMKtec a few months ago for an arcade cabinet project and the thing doesn't run into any problems until I try to run a Dreamcast game. For $320 I could get something that runs PS3 emulators.
Hell for 320 you could get your hands on the Deck.
I think for less than 320 you could get an actual ps3. something that occurred to me during the video was the repurposing of used school chrome books. Their silicon is still working but they get limited by Google's updates to phase them out within two years. It is way more work than the mini PC and possibly the Pi as well since you have to basically jailbreak them but from my understanding, the price to performance not including sweat equity is not so bad.
I saw on amazon Intel mini pc with i7 11th gen cpu, with Iris XE graphics for $199 (16GB ram + 512GB NVME).
my athlon 5150 runs dreamcast games with ease lol
and i bought that 8 years ago with mini itx motherboard for £50
Great content, in the end you’re always going to have a consumer who wants to buy and drive a car, then there’s the enthusiast who enjoys working and modify everything on the car.
Except in this analogy the enthusiast is modifying a Geo Metro or a Yugo.
I don't see raspi as a villain but I do think prioritizing commercial customers was a mistake. It let the scalper market thrive and drove most hobbyists to look at alternatives.
I know I haven't been able to afford continuing with them and it affected me in a way where I haven't been interested to see if the hobbyist market for raspi has recovered.
Love the product. Just can't get them, or couldn't for long enough that I've erased the platform as an option for my projects, in my own mind.
User-upgradable RAM is another advantage of the tiny PC. Also, Rpi OS does come with an office suite and other software which could be considered “bloat” if you don’t need it.
I think RPi became the enemy when they gave people what they said they wanted: a desktop replacement Pi.
considering windows doesn't come with any office software, but comes with _linkedin_ of all things, I would consider that a win for PiOS
@@Klaevin Jeff says the N100 machine with Win11 has Office at 18:42. Also, Win11 is pretty bad overall, so I'm not dying on that hill. But the hardware... I mean, you could run a plethora of Linux distros on any X86/X64 machine and a TON more Linux software than on the Pi.
Don't get me wrong, I like that RPi comes bundled with an Office suite. But you can't have that as a plus on the RPi and a minus on the Win11 PC. You either want Office (or Libreoffice or whatever) or not.
@@MarcosCodas I missed that part. Sorry. I would like to add that since you have to pay to keep office on windows, and it comes pre-installed, it's more if a bloat, than something that just comes bundled. I wouldn't call windows defender "bloat" but "1 free year of Norton!" definitely is.
This seems like a gray area and trying to say where the line is for "bloat" is going to be personal. I mean, some people consider GUIs as bloat.
And often more upgradeable than the specs indicate. With the exception of the N100's that have soldered on memory, of which I own a few, many of the N100's that use laptop memory can indeed be upgraded to 32G of ram instead of the spec 16G that Intel states. This is also true for the 8 core N305's as well. Most of my N100's have dual 2.5G NICs as well, plus wifi.
There are more expensive N100's with soldered memory - but these things are TINY, may as well be called MICRO'S .. We're talking 3 inches square by 2 inches tall. Some of these have FOUR 2.5 G NICs.
@@Klaevin Yep, totally
About a year ago I bought a used dell miniPC instead of a Pi for a game emulator project. The experience definitely changed my opinion on SBCs, unless I need something very tiny and barebones, it almost always makes sense to go with these x86 miniPCs now that they’re about as cheap and almost always more powerful.
plus: mainstream. You can put Windows and Linux it, without tinkering. Easy and nice.
I did the exact same thing. Offices sell these in bulk for practically nothing.
I think they became a villain when people realized that it’s not really a $35 device.
I have to admit. I have been playing with Raspberry Pis forever. I have about a dozen of them in various sizes. I've build a NAS, an OpenVPN server, a Media player, a rain detector, remote hedgehog camera system, CCTV DVR etc etc - but this December I bought 2 BMAX mini PCs for around $100 (well £85 TBH) each. I now have a PC NAS (Openmediavault) and I'm using the other as a media player. I can't imagine buying another Pi unless I need something with digital I/O.
"Geekbenches per watt" is my new favorite benchmark metric
To be fair to the GMKtec, you're under no obligation to use windows. It is great that it comes with a license, but you can flash linux the same way you would with the pi.
I'd rather pay a bit less and not get the 'doze licence at all...
@@cooperised They probably paid more for the box it came in than the Windows license.
@@john_in_phoenix Yes, but reality is - we're talking Chinese here; not sure how many come with legit licenses, or if it was just "hacked" and not discoverable by Microsoft.
Jeff and his Dad are two of the best reasons to look at TH-cam. (another radio engineer, here)
A few family members have asked for a simple office pc, and I always look for a cheap, refurbished small form factor Dell Optiplex.
The quality is fantastic, they're build to run 24/7, they usually have an i5 from 3rd to 6th gen, have 8 GB of memory and nowadays they sell them with new SSD's (so I don't have to replace the old HDD myself) for anywhere between $90 and $150.
But, that new GMKtec sure does look like a great option to me.
Where have you been finding your refurbished Optiplexes? Dell's website only has the $600/$700 refurbished ones.
Ebay
I bought a GMKTek NUC-G3. I love it. Around $155.
eBay is great.
@@NoName-py4en He means 2nd hnd trade ins or ex-lease. Depending on where you are a local pc shop may have them. Dell's are quite popular here & plenty of ex lease available. The other option maybe local recycler of e-waste as we have some here that rebuild dumped pc's. Even local businesses may have some in a back room due to upgrading
I never could find the "$5 Pi Zero" for under $25. That's the problem, they've always been way more costly than their advertised price. With the exception of the Pi Pico, with all the RP2040 clones, I can actually get one for $4. The black clone anyway.
Pi Pico is also a waste of money, it's better to spend that buck on ESP32.
I chimed in on this issue on your channel a few months ago, but Pi’s let me down so much on limitations, and I moved on to
If there's one universal between Pis, mini PCs, homelabbing, and sysadminning, it's Ansible!
Yeah, for even less than the mini-PC.. if that's important.. you can get a 2011/2012 Mac Mini that's silent, runs Linux, and even being 13 years old will runs circles around the Pi 4 (except on power budget).
Besides N100 PCs offer upgradability. It can run VMs with sufficient memory since its just x64. So given the right N100, N200, N300 etc. boards, you could get configs with multiple ethernet ports and run it a VM machine with Proxmox in a compact size. There are tons of variants out there each offering their own uses as NAS, VM server, based on what I/O they provide.
@@thisisreallyme3130 Or an old iMac!
@@thisisreallyme3130 Those have weird power supplies though. Obviously not everyone is off grid with a less than top tier inverter but if you are, the PFC in those can cause some crazy LED flickering.
Thing is, businesses are eating up Raspberry Pis like hotcakes! They're part of the supply chain(I was once part of a company that assembled gigantic pipe cutters)
They rely on the reputation and reliability that the brand provides, so the company is almost always strapped for supply. Hence why us as individuals have to move to these less reliable, albeit more affordable Chinese brands.
I can't imagine a gigantic mining machinery running on a Minisforum.
Definitely in the "dropping a damn screw on the ground and searching for it for 10+ minutes" club right with you. Between drones, 3D printers, and computers, I've dropped enough screws to fasten a car together...
You realize you *have* to wear shoes because otherwise you'll have a few screws embedded in your foot soon enough!
@@JeffGeerling That's how I find them!
Use a cloth or something soft on your workbench, the screws wont bounce when dropped. Use a cloth with a contrasting colour to what you are working with.
@@Voyajer. Keep in mind Jeff suffers from a chronic condition like a lot of us do. Mine is diabetes, he explained his in another great video. These conditions often reduce your body's ability to fight infections, so shoes are a MUST have for those who can't afford to have damage to their feet.
@@trulsvian Or one of those great magnetic pads from iFixit. :)
The N100's iGPU is its major ace in the hole - 4K HEVC transcoding, more emulation horsepower, real hardware-accelerated video editing chops... The Pi costs too much and delivers too little.
Also, the N100 has many more PCIe lanes, leading to the existence of cool router / NAS boards based on it.
@@WhiteG60 no matter how you slice it, the N100 can stream my BluRays, and the RPi 5 can't.
@@WhiteG60 TH-cam doesn't serve videos in HEVC, of course it's gonna suck. AV1 decode should've been included
@@marshallb5210it’s included on the n100. It can play 8k60 TH-cam in av1. It’s amazing.
@@WhiteG60 The problem is that it only has a HEVC hardware decoder!... no H264, no AV1, no VP9... major letdown!
I actually bought the GMKtec NucBox G3 recently (I was also considering Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 Plus) - my use case is a home server / TV media center. I bought barebone version and added 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB NVMe (I didn't care about Windows and just installed Debian Linux on it). At least in my area the cost was pretty much te same for N100 vs Rasp 5 (Raspberry is less cost effective than it used to be and it gets worse if you have to buy a HAT for SSD).
One thing I can say is that Linux is a bit more energy efficient than Windows - at idle my GMKtec NucBox G3 was consuming 8 W. But then, I noticed that in BIOS pretty much all energy saving options are disabled by default. Once I enabled Render Standby for GPU, C states for CPU, all ASPM options for all PCIE slots that allow it and I turned off some things I don't use (like SATA controller, also disabled WiFi and Bluetooth in the OS) I finally ended with 4 - 4.5 W range in idle.
Yeah, that's more like it, your idle numbers mirror what's been reported on the STH forum megathread for the N100 devices. I've got the N100's older brother, an N5105, and with 2-3 2.5 Gbe ports active and no real BIOS tuning, it sits a little over 8.5 w running OpenWrt linux...
Raspberry, in fact, has only one key feature: IO port that you can use with minimal pain. But this feature is not required for "just small pc".
You should test GNKtec with Linux, ensuring it's the same system used on Raspberry Pi for a fair and accurate benchmark comparison.
I think they choose the role of villain when they literally hired a guy to advocate for police surveillance use.
i mean the main advantage of using a raspberry pi is really the GPIO pins, not it being a usable computer
if all you need is GPIO pins, buy an arduino nano or an esp32 for $3...
@@TheKetsa Those don't have as much processing power if you need it, neither do they have wired ethernet, expandable storage, easy video output, etc...
Though you could buy a raspberry pi pico and an old laptop, hook them up via usb and use the laptop to control most of the GPIO on the pi pico, and have the laptop's processing power to do whatever
@@TheKetsaIf I wanted to build a fully self-sustained computer vision system with object detection, I’d need a pi as object detection is very resource heavy (using this example because it’s exactly what I’m currently doing), I’ll need the GPIO pins too, as I need to control other pieces of hardware (motors, servo’s, etc) directly from the pi.
@@demonman1234what they are saying is you can just implement sensors, motors etc on an MCU host, all the resource heavy compute is done on a laptop/pc which communicates to the MCU by USB etc. very similar to how klipper works
Nobody sponsors this video... except the sponsors! I get what you're saying (you're not taking any corporate sponsorship, direct sponsorship), it was just really funny to hear that.
It's about time people directly support their favourite creators. Brand sponsorship doesn't do enough justice as most people always led to believe.
I bought one of those N100 Mini PCs for a jank NAS. Plugged in a USB 5-bay SATA JBOD hard drive dock filled with 10TB drives, and shared them on my network. No fancy backup software or anything, just drag-and-drop. One drive is used for Jellyfin media. Once I got it up and running, I run it headless, just sitting on a shelf beside my desk with the dock. It doesn't do anything except share the drives, and encoding when I'm using Jellyfin. It does exactly what I need it to do.
Neat. Maybe I will build this.been needing a nas for a while now
@@radnukespeoplesminds I could have went other ways and did things right, using something like TrueNAS, but I wanted it to be super simple and easy to use. Bought everything from Amazon, and wasn't all that expensive, in my opinion. 100ish for the mini pc, 189ish for the dock, and about 150 for each drive. I'm sure I can set it up somehow to do full backups of my machines on the network, but that's not the point of it. I just use it to keep ISOS of stuff I work on, family photos/videos, and my massive collection of media.
I guess it's not stupid/jank if it works.
The popularity of it within the industry combined with scalpers meant nearly every model had shortages. The main appeal is modularity, project versatility (especially with GPIO), low power draw, and community. If that doesn't matter to you, a mini pc is more your speed but it's more limited in some aspects.
Raspberry pi pico 🤝 mini pc
This is also my philosophy, if I need gpio I use a pi. If I just need a server of some kind I would go for a mini PC, but I have enough old laptops that I use them.
Dante, I have yet to find a good guide to using a pico as gpio from a Linux system. Can you point out a good guide?
@@eslmatt811 There are some projects like picod that talk to the Pi Pico via /dev/ttyACM when its plugged in via USB. So its using the Pico as an expander much like how embedded systems contain both the main processing system (full CPU) and the processing logic (small chip).
The N100 Amazon link now takes you to a $550 device. The N100 appears to be $180.
The link now takes you to a $160 N100. I'm writing this on the first of February.
It seems like lots of Amazon products will raise their price if a popular TH-cam video links to the product. I think it's slimy of the seller to do this sort of thing.
about ~$120 on Aliexpress.
@@ddegn What’s usually actually happening is that the product had multiple vendors selling it for different amounts (some normal, some ridiculous) and when demand spikes the vendors selling it for a low price quickly run out of stock.
@@bergamt Isn't each seller listed on a separate page? I'm pretty sure a link to page on Amazon is only to that seller. So if the price goes up, that seller raised the price. At least that's the way I understand it.
@@ddegn No, a single Amazon product page link can have one or many sellers who all compete to own the “buy box” on the product page (the rest get hidden in the “other sellers” page). The algorithm that Amazon uses to pick a seller is complicated but sale price is a major factor.
Google “how to win the Amazon buy box” and you’ll find dozens of articles explaining how it works.
Comparing the Pi running Linux to the N100 running windows invalidates the whole video, sadly. Really, it becomes bs, because windows does run so much crap in the background. You should have ran the same OS on both. Or you should have ran both linux (same distro) and (freshly installed) windows on both.
GMTek is good for people who want just a small homeserver / mediabox / emulation station. The pi with its gpio etc could also be used for that, but the strenghts are definetly on robotics projects etc.
Arduinos of some description are a good option for robotic projects. You could easily interface with them from the gmtek (either wifi or Bluetooth if you use an esp32 as the Arduino, or even just using serial via the USB)
If you need computer vision, the nvidia jetson platform is way more efficient. If you just need movement + basic sensors: arduino arm, esp, stm and pi pico platforms work fine. And if you need more than arm m, pi nano2 is a quadcore that uses way less juice. And if you want a proper arm workstation, there's a macbook apple wants to sell you.
FT232H breakout is an option. Plug in the USB, then solder away with basic GPIO capabilities.
@@BrianLough of course, but i can cut out the middleman with the pi's gpio and i have direct, faster access to the hardware i use.
I used to do retro pie for my arcade cabs, and have switched to running launchbox on PC with mini PCs. It got to where a pie wasn’t actually cheaper, and while windows kinda sucks, it’s more “known” in how it sucks than raspbian is. (I have a Linux laptop for work and work as a software engineer on Linux systems. I’m not scared of Unix. But retropie/raspbian behaves weird at times).
I don’t hate pies, but mini PCs got better and cheaper as pies got more expensive, and it’s kinda hard to get past that.
How do you get around the Windows update junk, marketing, Microsoft Account, etc. nonsense? There is a big appeal for a "launch and go" system for dedicated stuff (I do robots rather than cabs).
@@RobotWrangler - fair points. I still have Win 10 on some of my arcade mini PCs which avoids some of the more recent Microsoft toxicity, and the newer ones that have Windows 11, I did in fact jump through some hoops with not connecting them to the network and issuing command line overrides when setting them up to allow me to procede with local users, and not letting them download updates with metered connections, which still worked at least on my machines. So it's true that there is futzing to do with Windows, at least if you don't want to deal with Microsoft's bullpoop. But there is initial setup with a pie too, and I still find it easier to maintain the game software on the windows box than I did on the pie. Your mileage may vary for robots.
@@jmcminn1076 Why not install Linux on them?
Proton is amazing nowadays and you could setup something with gamescope like steamdecks use to have a proper feeling setup
@@RobotWrangler It's been awhile since I've installed Windows, but last I heard, with 10 or 11 you can just unplug the internet during start-up and it'll let you create a fully local account.
The updates AFAIK aren't dodgeable. And yea, they seem to do internal marketing like pitching you use OneDrive, and I'm sure that gets annoying, but I think that stuff is pretty minimal, may even be able to be turned off.
There's def. a little extra setup in Windows comparatively. But it's also only a 1-time thing. You spend 20 minutes doing it one day, and you shouldn't have to again. The updates suck.....but Ubuntu/Debian Linux isn't much better at this point. I get kernel updates like every couple of weeks and I feel like I'm constantly either restarting or delaying them. And one thing I'll say about Windows, I used to use it regularly, and only 1 time in the past ~15 years or so have I had a Windows update bork my system. But I've lost more than my fair share of video drivers to kernel updates in Linux. And then sometimes there's problems to rebuild the module and then it's like "OK, I guess my Tuesday afternoon is gonna be 'debug Ubuntu' day instead of work."
@@jmcminn1076 Why not install linux on your mini pc? Am I missing something?
I think the real time that Raspberry Pi became the villain was with their blog post about hiring Toby Roberts that seemed to glorify intrusive covert surveillance, or maybe they became the villain with how they handled negative responses to that blog post. For a more practical complaint, I'm peeved that they don't enable small volume purchasing of the Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2 at a non subsidized price.
yeah Jeff really missed the mark by leaving this out
That was the last straw for me. Never buying from this company again. They don’t care about the customers that made them popular, they aren’t following their original mission, and now they aren’t aligned with my sense of morality.
I bought a Raspi 1 when it was launched. I was shocked by the arrogant tone of voice on the raspi forum then, and also by the Raspi people themselves. So that was the last Raspi I bought. And in 2016 I switched to a NanoPi NEO 2, for 19 USD ex shipping. I now the only SBC I have, is a RISC-V. Plus two NUCs.
Thanks for showing the Ninja HDR Monitor/Recorder. My colleague and I had been looking for a way to capture boot sequences, BIOS setups, and other things for tutorials for our students. Keep up the great work.
I just bought a new mini pc from lenovo with 16gb ram, 512gb ssd and intel i5 quad core with around 120eur, installed ubuntu on it and I'm not even thinking about pi anymore. The only killer that they still have is the pi pico, which is awesome (btw that's the reason I actually bought the mini pic in the first place, to have it as a dedicated dev environment for pi pico...)
I'd love to see what the same N100 machine would in Geekbench with a thin Linux distro running.
The Pi case problem is a major problem for me. I don't like exposing electronic devices to dust. Many of these Pi cases leave the board loose inside the case.
The Argon cases are some of my favorite. And it's early enough in the Pi 5 lifecycle we'll probably see a few good cases with passive cooling and good enclosures for HATs.
Many of my Pis have no cases - they’re all fine. The only real issue that I’ve had is when I encased a few Pis in these solid Al heat sink style cases: the design left the SD card vulnerable and I broke the SD card slot on them.
There are hundreds of millions of fully encased PCs around the world slowly gathering dust for years without any problems. (Seriously, open up any PC case sand the motherboard is likely covered in dust.)
Lacking a case of more of an aesthetic problem than anything else in most cases.
@@EnglishMike For me the biggest benefit of having a case is that objects or fingers don't intersect with the spinning fan(s).
Honestly I would blame you for scaring me with that sponsorship joke, but it honestly felt like a breath of fresh air to see someone poke fun at awful sponsor transitions. You're the fucking savior of my sanity.
I've noticed that on many forums people are buying raspberry pi's for general purpose computing tasks. You hear people say they use it for web browsing, retro gaming, learning how to code Python or run self hosting apps like Home Assistant. Those are things that a x86 mini PC can do (and in some cases, do better, because their iGPU's are way faster and they support NVME storage and expandable RAM) they've never asked whether they'd want to use the Pi- exclusive features (like the easily accessible GPIO pins or pi hats)
Because if you do not plan to touch those GPIO pins at all, do not have special connectivity needs or not have the desire to tinker with the hardware, then why even buy a Pi?
That's a great point 👏
If these mini PCs take that market, no loss
Space issues I don’t have much room to put shit so a pi makes sense
The most surprising thing about this video was how fast 20 minutes can go. Great video, keep up the good work.😊
I would say its a scary thing
Personally for me, it's a good way of just having a desktop that I can directly access the pins for EE breadboarding and other microcontroller shenanigans.
I wasn't aware Jason Statham was behind the Raspberry Pi.
I think a lot of people had a simmilar "journey" as me. I started hosting a few Network Services like Pihole, NAS, ... on a PI 2 where eventually I moved on to a Celeron J3455 NUC which I set up with Proxmox and 16 GB of RAM from which I now moved on to a Ryzen 2700x Server with 64 GB RAM.
xeons golds are going used for ~30/40e now, and dual mobos+~64gb of ram for 'em for ~200. for 300e you can have 48x2 lcpus at home (with that old atx box and a decent psu), that's 1ghz clpu for 1euro :-) rasberry pi's 5 bogomips shoud cost at most 10e compared to that :-)
I know there’s always a push to upgrade and a demand for more performance, but 4s are typically fine for my uses.
When did Jeff Geerling become the hero?
When he pulled off that ultra slick non segway in the beginning!!!
@@frogslayer4849 Hate to be that guy, but it's segue. Segway is an electric scooter company.
Hey, I actually ended up using the mini PC you have here for a recent project of mine! I made a personal home intranet system with file sharing services and localhosted websites. Later this week I'll work on some large file transfers onto it. Thanks for posting!
I've used those little Intel boxes to build servers for various things around the house. They're pretty good! I think as Linux boxes i prefer them to the pis. I've had a few pis over the years.
Nowadays we don't need 50% (or more) of the computing power we pack in desktop builds, tbh. We use it only when playing games or encoding something. For anything else those little boxes are more than anyone need. I'm a profesional 2D artist and for my last workstation I just built an itx with a ryzen 5600g. Instead of getting a gpu I added extra ram (art software does not need to move billions of triangles, but it does need ram for the many layers). It's already a few years old, but it packs power for me not to need to upgrade in the next 5 years.
The pi zero still holds a dear place in my heart. A $10 computer that can run a full OS 😍
Zero (and 2 W) is probably the nicest price point / value for a Pi right now.
didnt u see the video? its 120.
@@Fanaz10this video list that price for a pi 5, this commenter is talking about a pi zero. The pi zero 2 w is currently £20 from amazon and the original pi zero is £5 from pihut
‘Original’ in this case actually being 1.3 which was the second major revision
@@JeffGeerling the N100 is $659 au which is a long way from your prices ,even u.s. to au bucks.
when i first got into pi projects they were extremely affordable and accessible. You could get any form factor you wanted, any model you wanted, any hat you wanted, any accessory you wanted very cheaply, quickly, and easily. Now there are such supply issues that raspberry pis are no longer all that viable. When the pi5 came out it cost close to 500 bucks for one, and while the price has come down they're still hard to get. Accessory availability is also at an all time low.
It really was the Commodore 64 of it's era - Made "for the masses, not the classes" as founder Tramiel said. But Raspberry Pi went the way of the Commodore-Amiga. I suspect they are still around, but make expensive mediocre machines. But even today, Amiga also has it's devoted following.
Prioritizing business over hobbyist in a shortage is NOT a villain move wtf??
0:37 LTT vibes coming up XD
Yes
I think a culmination of factors have knocked the pi off of the top spot. like the chip shortage, and the dropping prices of mini computers. to the point where a raspberry pi makes sense only for niche use cases, like in industry. even if you need the IO pins for a project, in a lot of cases an arduino uno would also be a good substitute.
And ESP32 and Pico shored up many of the low end use-cases, like throwing a Pi in as a little remote monitoring node. Now it's just as easy (if not easier) to get that running with ESPHome or MicroPython, and the microcontrollers use way less power.
@@JeffGeerling They also oblivate much of the need for built-in GPIO on larger systems. A Pico/ESP/STM/AVR/etc hanging off a USB port doing a dedicated task that's controlled and monitored by the larger-scale host is a completely reasonable approach. You can run all the hard realtime tasks on their own controller and not have to ever worry about doing realtime tasks under Linux.
Most of my projects use ESP32 dev boards. I use a Pi as the core, running NodeRed for example.
At the moment I’m not using the i/o of a Pi. So I could use a mini-pc. But a Pi Zero 2w is so small I can put it in a box and hide it anywhere convenient. I use a lap-top running Windows to program the ESP32 boards. I tried using a Pi 4b, but it was too difficult. The PC is better as a general purpose computer for me, probably because I don’t need to use anything more than Windows software.
An n100 and a microcontroller gives you a lot more range of operations than a pi for the most part and for less. The big saving grace the pi has is the compute module which allows you to build specialist motherboards for your smaller and more permanently integrated projects
"Niche cases, like in industry"? Those are literally the opposite of niche cases...
A long time ago. My problem I had with the RasPi4 was trying to use them as a basic computer for the kids during COVID lockdowns. I bought one and tried to use it doing basic things they would need to do. Well it failed, massively. So I bought the 1st Gen GMK NUC for about the same price as the RasPi4 with a case. Guess what, the whole COVID shutdown the kids used those without issues running EndeavourOS (Arch based Linux). They could do zoom, play minecraft, do homework, etc. So unless you have a specific task that has a ARM based program and need the slightly lower power usage then get a Pi. Otherwise save yourself a bunch of headaches and just get a MiniPC you know all the software you need is going to run and video performance will slaughter.
Is *EndeavourOS* a good way to start using Linux? Do you know if it's "dual boot friendly'?
I hate Windows but I'm still wary about using Linux.
Fun thing I found out with dropping screws, if you just put a hand towel on your desk and put the screws on that when you drop them they almost always stay exactly where you think they went.
Funny.
I needed a private servers for few places. So I purchased a few second hand HP G300 Mini's, that are i5 quad-core with 16 GB of RAM and 480 or 960 Gb SSD. I paid each a fair 80 €. The Windows 10 in them I upgraded to Windows 11 (via simple method removing the TPM2 requirement, as I don't encrypt drives with MS partition) and they are idling at 7-8 W consumption when running a simple HTTP/SSH server. On load they are at 9-11W consumption when playing a 4K video from youtube.
So off I go and installed Linux, the idling consumtion after few days (as with Windows) was 5.5-6W and on load it was 7-8W.
The machines are larger than those about same as combined. But integrated WiFi with good antennas, three DisplayPort, six USB (4x 3.1 and 2x 2.0) and place for a another drive.
The downside really is that you need to place somewhere the power unit that is midway of the cable.
Oh, and has integrated VESA holes, so you get it straight to display, and bluetooth works great (IIRC v5.0).
I as well have been purchasing old Apple laptops, 2009-2012 era. Just get a in good external shape, display intact and keyboard etc, and they will serve very well. This is written on the 2011 Macbook Air 13" that I just replaced the battery. The integrated 4GB RAM is totally limitation, that you can see problematic with Firefox after 40+ tabs open from what 10 are TH-cam, you need to set browser purge cache from old tabs or it will swap hell out... Otherwise, you can render Full HD video at about 30-40 FPS rate, and 4K video even renders at 15 FPS. To say it for a travel laptop it is excellent, and all this for 60€ + 25 for battery.
If someone wants low energy computer, these kinds are very low energy users. You don't need a 80-150W PC humming under sesktop with 45-100W monitor attached to it.
Raspery Pi died because it became over 25 €. The idea was to be a learning experience for a computer. And now it is better get a Arduino board and just make own small custom smarthome applicants from those.
When the PI 4 came out, I used it for my desktop and I am (or was - I've retired since then) a full-stack professional web developer. It didn't perform like my dual-xeon server but it worked well enough. When work-from-home came around, I did switch to my laptop so I could be more productive for work, but for most people, doing a little bit of typing work, a little bit of email, and a lot of surfing, the PI 4 was great. I didn't even know the PI 5 was out until I watched this video but for all of my electronics work, controlling I/O and custom home control modules, etc., my stack of Pi 2, Pi 3, and Pi4s are doing the job just fine.
I love the pi5 but the market around mini/micro pcs has matured so much since the pi originally hit the market making for some great price competitive alternatives
Yeah the problem is RPi company got greedy. It was supposed to be a 35€ device, not a 70€ one.
Their business decisions certainly affected their status with the hobbyist community. As someone who once ran a business, it was understandable... But they still shat on the community that made them. Some will come back, some won't. I think the Pi 5 and it's prices may help heal that divide.
As to your case issue.... PiShop High-Pi Pro case with fan on the END of the case.
I don't think the Pi5 will 'heal that divide', the damage is already done and there are now many many alternatives to a Pi that we're using. A high powered Pi is really not needed now when SFF PC's are similar priced and more powerful with Linux. Pi's main advantage was their price, they were almost disposable, but not now.. Now we have to think twice about deploying a Pi or a SFF PC... Added to this Raspberry's blatant abandonment of the community in favor of big business, then no, that divide will not heal. As far as I'm concerned, Raspberry is now just one of many fighting for business with very little USP.
Fully agreed. I actively avoid buying Pi. I exhausted all other options. You said it best. I am not a cynic, so I have not discounted their use, but it is my last choice.
I don't agree that the community made them. The documentation made them. From the beginning the Pi was targeting commercial customers, it's just that when the shortages hit the blinders came off.
I was just doing this kind of math today. Thanks Jeff! The only point I would raise is that you had to write an RpOS image on the nvme, and in the same way you can write a debian installer on a flashdrive and never have to deal with windows on the mini pc.
IMHO the Pi died when those ThinkCentre tiny computers and similar offerings from Dell and HP started getting surplussed onto the market. They are somewhat expandable for their size and much more capable.
IMO, the Pi never really died. The price/performance of the Pi was never there, since from the beginning, you could buy a used Pentium 4 machine off someone for about the same price that would run rings around the Pi 1. The strength of the Pi was the I/O pins, the stability of the software stack, and the documentation. All the clones are missing at least one of the three.
The same things that make it attractive to hobbyists (good documentation, stable hardware/software over time, I/O pins) also make it attractive for low-volume businesses. You can't have one without the other, and a business where a Pi makes up $35 of a $3,500 product is going to tolerate a lot higher prices than a hobbyist because it still saves them $100/hr development time.
Dont get me wrong. I can't argue that I have learned a lot from Cisco Charles, But I feel like i could take a cross country roadtrip with Mr. Geerling here and not want to leap from the car half way. The truth is i learn just as must IT here!! you're the man, please keep it up you're very appreciated!