The Future of Consumer SBCs: Has the Pi bubble burst?

Great overview of the situation; I think one good outcome of the whole thing is that efficiency is something that's actually cared about these days, as moore's law keeps getting bumped out. Performance per watt is a more important metric than ever, and we are seeing some pretty powerful hardware using less than 5 or 10 watts!

The raspberry pi is useless if people can't afford it.

Feature creep and bloat are the banes of computing. For instance, years ago, we had perfectly functional word processing, database, and spreadsheet programs. They were easy to use and did anything that 99% of the users wanted. And, because computer systems didn't have many resources, these programs didn't use many. But then companies started adding features -- often features no one wanted -- to their software. The new programs were more complicated to use and used many more computer resources. Great news, if your business is selling new pieces of computer kit. Bad news if you are a consumer. And just as soon as the user managed to learn how to use the new software, the software company came out with a "new and improved" version. This version had MORE features no one wanted, used more computer resources, and had a new and more complicated UI. This cycle continues unabated today.

You've been a constant source of knowledge in the Tech Space, keep doing what you do.

I have to say you are definitely the kind of lecturer I wish I had at university. Always engaging, always interesting, always concise... well worth the many hours I've binged so far looking at your previous content!

From $35 to $200 it has no longer been an option for my University. We’ve completely dropped the use of RPI and switch to alternative SBCs that are more available and affordable. The support of other SBCs has greatly increased over the years compared to what it used to be. Given that the price and availability made RPI attractive both of those positives are now a thing of the past. When they meet both of those criteria again we may switch back but until then we are done with the RPI Foundation.

I was really into the Raspberry Pi a few years ago, simply for the challenge of seeing if I could create usable, low cost desktop replacement. Thanks primarily to this channel I succeeded but unfortunately, after a while the shine wore off and I moved on to other challenges. I'm still a fan of SFF computers.

There are two additional categories of SBC consumer: Small business/ISV back office user and the home automation user. The SBC is perfect for the back office for hosting network shares and running scheduled processes (e.g. nightly cron jobs, offsite backups). It's an always on, low wattage device with enough compute to handle the basic tasks demanded of it. A SBC is a very good, fairly inexpensive option for small business owners instead of having to invest in expensive server hardware. They are also good machines for a centralized home automation host. One machine on the network that IoT devices can connect to and are controlled by. People are slowly realizing that cloud managed home automation isn't all that great.

I bought an Orange Pi Zero Plus and an Orange Pi PC back when they were both under 15 €. They are very versatile and useful devices (one is still in everyday use) & exceeded the expectations set by the low price, but nowadays you pay closer to 35 € or 40 € for the same exact models, probably plus shipping and taxes. At that price (for which you can sometimes get a used laptop), their limitations make them of dubious value—might as well pay twice as much for an x86 device with eight times the performance. The upper end of the 2020 SBC market (e.g. RK3399 devices) has been underwhelming in terms of user-ready software development. Three years later, something like the Rock Pi 4 still requires arcane Frankenstein-patching to have working video decoding—in only some circumstances, with some programs, under some desktop environments. It hasn't come down in price either, while X86 mini-PCs have closed the gap. The RK3588 may be powerful enough to bruteforce a lot of these problems with software decoding, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of an efficient and optimised ARM-SoC.

Raspberry Pi was the leader in SBC a couple of years ago. My opinion. Their inability to provide hardware to the maker community offered an opportunity for others to fill the vacuum. I was looking at several projects but the lack of hardware shut them down. While other manufactures are out there I am hesitant to change hardware and generally the cost is greater. I am not sure Rasp Pi can recover the base they once had. I think they are still struggling and are now in the catch up mode against other suppliers. The state of the art has moved on as you so aptly demonstrated. Great presentation.

IMO on-board flash storage would be a huge mistake. Right now, you can repurpose a Raspberry Pi simply by changing out the micro-SD card. If you want to experiment with something that could leave your OS unusable, just copy your main card first. It's not just the option to boot from a different drive - it's the ability to remove your normal drive and know that whatever damage your experiment does, even if you manage to erase or corrupt all connected media, your disconnected main OS card is absolutely immune. There's other use cases where that's not an issue, of course, but there's also other SBCs that already provide for those use cases.

This was a great insight into the consumer SBC market! Nobody could do it better than you, really. SBCs have certainly changed in the past decade, where we went from a low-cost SBC to learn coding and do projects on to SBCs that have about as much power as a typical desktop and exciting new things like a RISC-V processor. Keep that Pi bubble floating! (well, at least for as long as possible...)

My view is that the Pi5 may change things but a lot of the market has switched to either microcontrollers or low end x86 hardware. Maybe the Custard Pi 6B, whatever happened to it? 😅 It certainly doesn't help that a lot of non-raspberry SBCs tend to have poor software support, whereas any old distro can work on x86 hardware. An SBC costing more than $100 has a limited niche audience.

In the context of bridging the digital divide, I hope SBCs stay in an affordable price range. It would be fantastic if more schools and libraries could use Raspberry Pis to teach digital literacy skills.

Such an accurate recap of SBC's in the world today! Thanks as always Mr. Barnatt for explaining computers to the masses!!! Keep up the good work!

I think lots of people started with an RPi and while learning to make things with those they also learned that it was overkill to use an SBC for those small projects and they moved to microcontrollers (STM, ESP32, ... etc). Today we also see people buying a stronger SBC to replace their desktop. When you see what an SBC like the recent LattePanda Sigma is capable ... If those "high-end" SBCs continue evolving like that it might be the end for the desktop computer as we known it. Looks like the SBC market is splitting and the desktop users will get their own range of "high-end" SBCs.

A lot of people jumping into the hardware space forget that Raspi or any other ARM solution is the ARM tax that you pay ... I hope we see a lot more RISC-V architectures being manufactured as they'll keep the cost down and also speed up the development of the RISC-V platform as a whole

Very clear and concise presentation! It's helpful to get an understanding of the current state of SBC computing.

I always enjoy your videos! You are a great producer all around, and though I have limited actual application at the moment for your content, I keep watching to keep up with what's going on... and this video is another perfect example of it! Thanks!

I felt it in my bones that this would be a possible future, in the short term rather than the long term. It was fun while it lasted. *slides in an i5 Mini PC*. Thank you as ever Chris.