Comment by wolpoli
19 hours ago
Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
> Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
They may not have intended to be in direct competition, but in the current crisis conditions they are priced about the same as equivalent RAM/storage N150s, have even worse supply issues than the N150s, and have worse performance/watt than the N150s.
Its mighty hard to recommend them for new projects at the moment (nor any of the Pi clones, which are also rocketing in cost and dwindling in availability)
Among the people making things like a DIY NAS, who want fast USB, lots of cores and RAM, small-ish, not-too-bad power consumption, running Linux; and not caring much about GPIOs or passive cooling, it’s in competition with the N150
Among people who want GPIOs and network connectivity, a low price and an open, microcontroller like experience, not caring much about USB speeds and lots of cores and running Linux and suchlike, it’s in competition with the esp8266 & esp32. And the previous generations of RPi.
The Pi SBCs are squeezed in between the SFFs and the microcontrollers for many use cases. It's only a good fit if there is a need for the GPIOs/Linux/Display. For anything else, there are better products out there.
It is for those of us that rather play around with an ARM CPU, and first class Linux support.
IMHO people expected a Pi that offered similar performance as a Mac M1 but with Linux as first class citizen
I mean, they're still on some ancient node like 28nm last time I checked.