When Raspis first came out they were genuinely a massive innovation in having small computers people could learn on or build hobby projects from very cheaply.

Over the years this has changed as they have gotten expensive to the point of being out of this price range these days. There are cheaper alternatives.

I still think they are pretty cool pieces of technology for what they are but probably more niche than they used to be now.

Agree with the revolutionary access to simple computers for hobbyists.

I haven't used them much myself but now that I am thinking more about automation at home I'm realizing there are much cheaper and safer (lower current) options for things I want to achieve as compared to electronic or electromechanical control systems I am familiar with from industrial settings.

I think Raspberry Pi played a big part in creating the environment where there was a market for all this other innovation.

Maybe? Idk, didn't the BeagleBone boards already exist? It definitely made an impact and got more people into it, but I can see how hobbyists might think they didnt add all that much

when you gould get a decent tiny computer that is capable of real tasks for $60 it was great. $200 not so much. especially when you can get a used enterprise thin client for the same price

My first Raspberry Pi was the model 3B which my dad bought for 35 euros. I spent a week on that thing trying to get a desktop installed with Archlinux only to have it run like shit. Good times

Personally I got into hobby electronics and self hosting stuff when I got my first raspi in high school. My first server where I learned so much was a raspi!

I've learned a lot from the pi too! I think its a great little machine, but also it looks like the BeagleBoard beat it to market by about four years, so maybe it wasn't the pi itself that was so revolutionary and more the cultural movement around it

Ancient cat at least walked into your home and killed pests

It's cool because it draws next to no power at all.... Unless your specific use case needs to survive on a bare trickle of electricity there is no reason anyone should be buying a pi over an off-lease 1L mini-pc

Esp8266/Esp32-gang-with-asneeded-add-ons riseup!

I managed to get one second-hand from a friend who had upgraded. It was my first entry into self-hosting and running 24/7 automations, like public media archival scripts. Due to the popularity and forum support, it was pretty low-friction which allowed me to dive in easily without a mentor or excessive barriers. I had no hardware experience beyond assembling a PC from parts, so the accessibility was what gave me confidence to start.

A mini-PC would have been far more than needed, to the point it's wasteful for this kind of work, and the better embedded options (I'm sure there are plenty, and cheaper) were just too intimidating or manual to have drawn me in.

They existed at 4x the price.

I think raspberry pi really shone on the software side of things. ARM boards often tend to be a bit of ship-and-forget. RaspberryPi OS still supports the OG 14 years later, while most other distros have left 32 bit support in the dust.

Thats a really good point on both sides. I thought you might be overstating it on the price, but I looked it up and the XM in 2010 was at $150! BeagleBone in 2011 launched at $89 and in 2013 the BeagleBone Black came out at $45 so they were definitely playing catch up on the price. Raspberry Pi OS support has also been fantastic, with a bunch of flavors still hanging around. I used to use Arch for Pi because Debian didn't have MongoDB packaged in the version I needed 😄

EDIT:
For clarity Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 at the famously cheap $35

for the current price, yes

ESP32 + Arduino + Raspi: The ultimate dustgatherer collection because they’re cheap and you realize you don’t really need em

Yeah, I gave up on Raspberry Pi when they prioritized volume commercial customers over long tail users like me that needed just one.

The real question is "what's next?"
The niche is "a single board computer for hobby or technical experimentation".
So:

• low cost
• low power
• as much compute as you can get for that low power
• built-in standard peripherals, ditto above — with respect to radio you can get for that low power
• extensible (I/O pins are nice but what's really needed is a standard bus people can build on)
• wide support infrastructure (IDE, libraries, circuits, hats, etc.)
• hate to say it, but "AI ready" in the hushed tones of people running 28.9M parameter Large Language Models (LLM) on an $8 microcontroller (ESP32-S3) https://github.com/slvDev/esp32-ai/tree/main to push the inference to the edge

I'm thinking it will be RISC-V and not based on proprietary System on a Chip (SoC) technology.

I'm keen to learn what readers think it will be.

Change my mind.

Wait… less memes, more info. what can I do to avoid such items? What are better options?

Like I’m genuinely asking as a hobby tinkerer who only brushes up against this stuff with my career

idk why you'd want to avoid them since they're pretty great, and that's why I'm not aware of any alternatives, have been pretty happy with everything I bought