“Raspberry Pi Ltd, a leader in low-cost, high-performance computing, announces that it is considering an initial public offering (the “IPO” or the “Offer”) and that it intends to publish today a registration document (the “Registration Document”). The Company is considering applying for admission of its ordinary shares to the premium listing segment of the Official List of the FCA and to trading on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange (“Admission”).”
There’s been talk of this for a while. Sadly it means that things like quality, price, leaps in innovation, things remaining useable across different models, will inevitably get worse as they start to pursue profit over everything else.
Why would they do this? The Enshittification of SBC has begun :(
SBCs already had a few issues.
- ARM Mali driver absence from most distros.
- Compute modules are now standard with 5V rails, making battery operation clunkier, because data centers.
- And for a very long time, the 4x MIPI buses were hidden on Raspberry Pis, locking users out from most screens to hack to them.
- MIPI itself relies on custom “ignition” codes (don’t know what the actual architectural names were for them), that can in theory, be so personalized each individual display and camera could be locked to the SoCs to the point the display itself would need the “ignition” code.
My speculation: I think a lot of these were made to hinder making actual portable devices a lot more clunkier than they need to be. For displays, many use the HDMI port instead. Even official stuff has its own clunk, like the Pi 400 using USB specifically for keyboard, all while an I2C or SPI would have been more than sufficient. The GPIOs of those SoCs were made for this kind of purpose.
Beaglebone has always been less shittified than Rpi, but didn’t keep up price-wise.
Rpi fell under the spell of consumer attention almost from the beginning, abandoning whatever mission it had to make media center boards.
Besides Broadcom, Rpi is also under the thumb of ARM. I don’t see why else the Pico didn’t use RISC-V cores with actual mul/div and floating point hardware instead of the kludges they bolted onto the cortex m0.
Raspberry pi is basically a marketing exercise for broadcom that got out of hand, so it doesn’t surprise me they’re doing this, unfortunately.
So, since they’re going to become profit mongering dbags and ruin their product and brand, what are the best alternatives? I’ve never used them but I’ve been aware of them for several years now.
I have some projects that I’m working on that seemed like a Raspberry Pi would work well with but I’m not interested if they’re going public.
TIA!
Raxda. Profit-oriented from the get-go, but has excellent support. You might still need to fiddle with the official Mali drivers though (tougher than the Linux NVidia drivers).
Otherwise, if you just need a quick solution for let’s say, a NAS built around USB storage, you can just use anything as long as it has proper support for Armbian (Chinese manufacturer’s own Linux distros sometimes have spyware and stuff that make one of the cores run 100% all the time, also no Mali drivers).
Thanks for the response! I’ll look into Raxda to begin with.
