Raspberry Pi Ltd is considering an IPO

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/market-news/expected-intention-to-float/16470316

by sohkamyung • 2 years ago

417 458 2 years ago

jstanley• 2 years ago

What's the warning at the start all about? Aren't they violating their own terms by serving it publicly on the internet?

THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO OR FROM THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, SOUTH AFRICA, JAPAN OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE SUCH DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

Read the next 2 paras. It's SOP for for listings in the UK under the FSMA.

d1sxeyes• 2 years ago

I don’t know if LSE are obligated to follow laws in those countries, but they may add this disclaimer to help others who may be obligated to follow those laws?

Also I’m not in any of the jurisdictions mentioned, potentially there’s some kind of geoblocking on the document?

hayley-patton• 2 years ago

I can view it just fine in Australia. Now I'm going to download a car too before I get caught.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

It is not a disclaimer. It is a prohibition and yes this distribution to US is a breach. But that's normal for LSE. Barmy.

Shrezzing• 2 years ago

IPO announcements need to come from approved/authoritative organisations. This one is distributed by the UK's authoritative organisation - RNS news. In the other territories, IPO announcements also have to be made by authoritative organisations. RNS is approved in the UK, but not the other territories.

vermden• 2 years ago

This is a classic disclaimer put on top of all types of financial documents, you can see it all the time on IPO's, mergers, any type of corporate actions like repurchase offers, shareholders / bondholders meetings etc.

My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document, and thus use such disclaimer to attempt to push the responsibility to any party receiving the doc - "ah! see our disclaimer? you should not have read this doc, its on you now!"

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

My understanding is that the source knows they have no way of controlling the dissemination of the document

But they do. Geoblocking.

phendrenad22• 2 years ago

Could someone who links to the document be charged with copyright infringement?

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Good time to talk about the rPi alternatives?

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

I don't think so. I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Also, an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote, everybody prepared for the worst, but it didn't happen, at least yet. They are genuinely trying to make it better from my understanding, at least for now.

I think the biggest thread to ARM SBC ecosystem is Intel's N series systems, which can run both Linux and Windows 11 equally well. An N95 runs a familiar chipset & ISA with familiar system dynamics and standard ports with good IO performance. They can act as good home servers and entry level home computers.

Who can deny the charm of a small box with a mSATA + NVMe port, WiFi6, a proper BIOS, two screen outs backed by an acceptable GPU?

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 years ago

I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Exactly.

Pis are obviously not perfect. You can definitely find much better "deals" - but overall it is a very good product for what you're paying for.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote

No that's not an example. Bending Spoons has not IPOed.

HankB992• 2 years ago

Good time to talk about the rPi alternatives?

I do not think this changes anything in that regard. As a hobbyist I keep an eye on the competition and during Covid none of the alternatives appealed to me. I'm sure others came to different conclusions and found alternatives suitable.

The situation may be different for someone producing a product based on Pi H/W. They were treated well compared to the hobbyist market during shortages and I don't care to argue one way or the other whether this was good overall. If I was producing a product that needed something like a Pi to work, I would always be evaluating alternatives.

Once the Pi organization is publicly owned, their behavior will determine the need to talk about alternatives.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Once the Pi organization is publicly owned, their behavior will determine the need to talk about alternatives.

And why do you think I ask, technical reasons?

I can very well imagine the post IPO "foundation" - btw how does a "foundation" IPO? - making Pis unusable for licensing / financial reasons.

s_dev• 2 years ago

Arduino?

yau8edq12i2• 2 years ago

Completely different beast. Raspberry pis are full blown computers. Arduinos are microcontrollers with a little supporting circuitry. Even a pi zero beats a standard arduino out of the water.

whatevaa• 2 years ago

Do you also compare sandals and shoes, claiming they have the same purpose? Sounds ridiculous? Well...

gmiller1234563• 2 years ago

While the Arduino can replace a Pi in many projects I've seen, if you're reason for dropping th Pi is to avoid the issues corporations bring to the table, you're not going to be any happier with the Arduino.

haunter2• 2 years ago

Depends what do you want to do but I'd say Dell & Lenovo micro PCs. x86, changeable and upgradable CPU, RAM, and storage. And they are stil very very small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-x0mVgDABA I have severall Optiplex micros at home for selfhosting, playing around VMs etc and I love them.

In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.

No GPIO pins though.

adamjc• 2 years ago

Let the enshittification begin

BizarreByte• 2 years ago

This was my immediate thought, it's the beginning of the end.

Maybe I'm becoming bitter and cynical, but all I can see are things being ruined after IPOs and the like.

nullify88• 2 years ago

Arm listing in the US was apparently quite a blow to the London Stock Exchange. What kind of decisions drive a company to choose one exchange over another?

ekianjo• 2 years ago

the access to investment probably?

spacebanana7• 2 years ago

Generally it's easier from a compliance perspective to list in the same jurisdiction as your shareholders live. Otherwise there can be more admin work with withholding taxes etc.

Also a baseline of liquidity, rule of law, and the absence of capital controls are prerequisite.

kmlx2• 2 years ago

more liquidity

fidotron• 2 years ago

Way back when Arm were dual listed one of the explanations was that US based customers (meaning US based semi companies) preferred that the company was listed in the US and subjected to a similar regime, in addition to needed capital.

To be honest, that actually makes a decent amount of sense, but I suspect the real reason was to enable US investors to buy into it so they do not then support attacking the foreign interloper in their industry.

kmlx2• 2 years ago

it is also incredibly costly and difficult to be listed in multiple stock exchanges.

SilverBirch• 2 years ago

The biggest reason is access to capital. There's lots of institutional investors who are going to primarily invest in US equities, so if you're on the US stock market that's good. Even if those institutional investors do look at worldwide equities they're going to be limited in how much they allocate to it. It's also easier for investors - a single regulatory environment, no currency risk etc.

This used to be mitigated by the fact that other countries would have their own pools of capital, like domestic pension funds but with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.

dukeyukey5• 2 years ago

with the reforms to pensions UK pension funds are no longer a particularly good source of capital on the UK stock exchange.

Surely it's the other way around? The UK pension system has been reforming recently to _encourage_ more equity holdings, especially of UK-based companies.

boringg• 2 years ago

That's dissapointing. I was hoping they'd be happy getting enough revenue to stay private. What do they need to raise capital for?

s1k3s3• 2 years ago

They can't keep up with demand so that's one problem that could be solved with money.

ActionHank3• 2 years ago

Man, I can't wait for there to be 7 variants of RPi 6 all with some nondescript name and none of which actually offer exactly what I need, because they had to flood and segment the market.

They should stay private and build on the quality brand they have rather than trying to grow because reasons.

giantg2• 2 years ago

If it's a problem to be solved with money, it's likely they could do so with higher prices or loans. Even if they raise money through stock, it will end up with higher prices to make returns for investors. Public companies have higher regulatory overhead and will be at the will of the investors to make more money.

sircastor2• 2 years ago

Have their production issues been a function of money? I assumed it was components (pandemic related) and maybe manufacturing capacity (because they manufacture locally instead of China, for instance)

Pet_Ant• 2 years ago

Another way to keep up with demand is to jack up prices until the demand meets the supply. That's what I fear. They have the brandname recognition to pull it off.

M2Ys4U• 2 years ago

That's what debt is for.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

They haven't been able to keep up with global demand for what, half a decade now? That's a problem that you can easily throw money at and make it go away. This gap in supply and demand has led to many clones gaining popularity too, and while that's good for the end user because more choice, it's bad for their business.

glenstein• 2 years ago

They don't have to agree that it's their job to change the fundamental mission of the business into one of being accountable to shareholders.

They can, of course, but it's by no means a forced choice.

tjoff• 2 years ago

Sure they have, the pandemic was a huge, but temporary, issue.

Something more capital wouldn't necessarily have helped with either.

jsheard4• 2 years ago

Supply hasn't really been an issue since the Pi5 launched, PiLocator shows that nearly every official vendor has both variants in stock right now.

ta9883• 2 years ago

And their RP2040 was a huge success so they may want to go more into producing their own chips.

moffkalast7• 2 years ago

Now we just need a 5V version of it while everyone continues to produce parts that don't work with 3V signals nor level shifters. Looking at you WS2812 and analog sensors.

politelemon• 2 years ago

Does it feel like this was inevitable anyway? I had heard that the company was already focusing on OEMs and delivering their products to those companies first. Whereas in the early days the RPi company was positioning themselves as having an educational focus (and the hobbyists). I don't know how true this is, but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.

It is quite sad though as they will now have an incentive to profit over 'provide', and it will be nice while it lasts.

mlyle• 2 years ago

but is what I had read explaining the inability to get RPI4s and RPI5s over the past year.

RPi5 never really had a shortage; there was the couple of months of "preorder" during launch.

During the post-COVID extended Raspberry pi shortage, a big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.

To avoid screwing /a selected subset/ of customers that had designed in RPi products.

deelowe5• 2 years ago

I called this back in 2012. Despite all their talk of being a non-profit and changing the world, it always felt this was more of a "feel good" thing than their actual mission.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

Their "do no evil" phase lasted pretty long at least compared to places like OpenAI at least. At the end of the day are there any significant companies that managed to maintain a mission that wasn't "make tons of money for already rich people"?

robertlagrant6• 2 years ago

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is still a non profit, isn't it?

deelowe5• 2 years ago

This filing makes no mention of it and appears to state quite the opposite.

Raspberry Pi has a strong track record of revenue growth and profitability. For the year ended 31 December 2023, revenues were $265.8 million, with gross profit of $66.0 million, and operating profit of $37.5 million, as well as adjusted EBITDA of $43.5 million.

The filing goes on to provide various forward looking statements regarding growth and profitability. I find no mention of the original mission.

MarcScott• 2 years ago

I think you're confusing Trading with the Foundation. Go and have a look at the websites to educate yourself on the difference.

https://www.raspberrypi.com

https://www.raspberrypi.org

There's pleanty of information in the 'about' pages.

deelowe5• 2 years ago

I don't think so. Maybe I'm misremembering, but I distinctly recall when the Pi was first created, there was only one entity and it was non-profit.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

The R Pi commercial company dropped "Trading" years ago.

Aromasin2• 2 years ago

I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech. I think I remember them losing 30 £100M+ companies to the US exchange last year including some big really big names. I know this phenomenon isn't isolated to the UK either. With all the issues in Hong Kong over the last few years, companies have fled there too.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.

It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US. I don't think that's good for anyone, including US folks. Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.

doublesocket• 2 years ago

It hasn't gone well for several UK companies listing through SPACs on US exchanges recently. Think that's given plenty of reason for a rethink.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

I'm not sure, but there are other ways of listing besides SPACs, like ADRs

piltdownman3• 2 years ago

I can't think of a SPAC, regardless of nationality, that actually succeeded other than Cellebrite. SPACs in their current usage are basically vehicles to circumvent securities fraud and generate wild amounts of money based on hyperbolic slide-decks via PIPE and NAV offerings pre-DA - the amount of EV and Quadcopter plays that were obvious vaporware getting traction in 2020-2022 was insanity.

toast0• 2 years ago

I think of SPACs the same way I think of Regulation Crowdfunding [1]. If the company could have reasonably IPOd, they would have; if they're opting for a reduced process method, it's likely because they wouldn't look good in the traditional process, and it's best to avoid them.

OTOH, it's not like I'm investing in individual stocks anyway, I'm on team Boglehead, and everything is in index funds, other than equity based compensation which I don't have at the moment.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

justin66• 2 years ago

I'm sure those reasons are valid, but just the simple fact of the US stock market having much higher valuations than the UK market right now makes me wonder why they'd do an IPO in the UK. They'll get more money for the shares they sell in the US.

robertlagrant6• 2 years ago

From memory at my previous company, that was on LSE AIM, the discussion around LSE wasn't about Brexit or anything like that, it was the amount of investment capital available in US exchanges. The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.

sangnoir3• 2 years ago

The US has definitely got something right with incentivising investment.

Vacuuming retirement savings of tens of millions of workers and piping the funds directly to Wall Street? I think that captured investor-class who pony up billions but don't vote at AGMs has led to excesses that are negative to society as a whole.

wanderlust123• 2 years ago

Brexit has had an impact on the amount of investment capital that would park itself in UK exchanges. Investors seeing dimmer prospects in the UK would rightly park their cash in the US

edh649• 2 years ago

There's an excellent book just out about this and how the US has taken over the UK business world: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199503848-vassal-state

username332211• 2 years ago

Monopolies do as monopolies do; extract all the wealth they can from the system. The only people who benefit in a scenario where 95%+ of stock trades go through the NYSE is the NYSE.

What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?

I feel the theoretical possibility of wealth being extracted from you is somewhat insignificant compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK.

sigwinch28• 2 years ago

What's the risk here?

A monopolistic stock exchange could, off the top of my head: increase fees, engage in rentseeking behaviour, impose unfair rules, discriminate (against companies and traders) or reduce the quality of service.

Listing on different (or multiple) exchanges ensures that they engage in proper competition.

compared to the actual extractions you are subjected to in the UK

An apt example of why it's healthy to have competition. A working professional or business could relocate to a country where less of their wealth is taken from them.

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

What's the risk here? That if the NYSE establishes a monopoly, it could extract a 0.5% tax on every trade?

Whilst shares may be listed on the NYSE, they don't have to trade there - there's a number of alternative exchanges/ECNs/books/pools/brokers that will happily buy and sell NYSE listed shares cheaper/quicker than NYSE.

olddustytrail• 2 years ago

What if there was a large scale fraud on the exchange, and shares that were supposed to be owned by a person or fund were "owned" by several different people at once.

Or can someone provide a reason that's impossible?

Bearing in mind I've personally seen screwups with processing thousands of credit card transactions with a software update.

lxgr• 2 years ago

Trading becoming centralized in the US is a different thing from trading happening exclusively on the NYSE.

As far as I understand, we are so far away from that reality since Reg NMS that we are facing the opposite problems, if anything: A proliferation of markets that brokers are obliged to trade at in the interest of providing "the best price", the combination of which has created a giant industry of latency arbitrageurs.

vasco9• 2 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I understand the rationale. High interest rates, dwindling pension funds, executives wanting wages closer to US execs, fewer high-performing tech companies, Brexit isolation and a lack of committed domestic investors have all contributed to the LSE’s downward spiral.

Those might be factors but I'd wager the dominating factor to choosing to list in a US exchange is the monthly volume of ETF flow on the indexes you join. In the current world I think this factor dominates many others.

freeopinion2• 2 years ago

Could you or somebody else explain to the ignorant why that should matter to a corporation? If I want to buy or sale shares of my company once a month or less, why should it matter to me how many millions or billions of ETF flow through any particular index? How does that affect the equity of my company?

CapeTheory• 2 years ago

Dual class shares are part of the picture here. They are very common in the US, and allow founders to have their cake and eat it. UK regulators have historically frowned upon this, but that stance is beginning to soften.

wlll3• 2 years ago

Last I read (https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance...) companies seem to be undervalued on the LSE, it seems to be like if I ran a company I might be leaving money on the table listing there.

Agree that centralisation isn't ideal.

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

The wealthiest and most popular exchange brings in the most money. Exchanges realize this and try to sweeten the deal if their exchange is short on a few things. It is not all about money on the table.

Aromasin2• 2 years ago

I'd argue that thinking solely in terms of potential investment opportunity isn't capturing the whole value of trading on your local country's stock exchange. It's more money and a larger investor pool today, but less choice and power over one's destiny tomorrow. These sorts of economic micro-decisions accumulate. Where to put a company HQ, what stock exchange to trade on, hiring locally or abroad, selling up to foreign equity funds. As individual business decisions, the leaders might think it's an insignificant drop in the pond and simply the most important thing is making revenue tick up, but there are consequences to that being your only metric of success. It's jumping ship while the rest of the crew is trying to plug holes and bail it out. You've successfully escaped the sinking ship but are now in deep, shark-infested waters.

Perhaps I've just been reading too much on geopolitical power dynamics lately, but as a British person, I fear our economy is suffering from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts from seemingly "insignificant" decisions that pass on tiny parts of our sovereignty to other countries. In the case of companies trading on other exchanges, we're leaving ourselves more open to the whims of the investors on that exchange whose priorities and sentiments don't match the spirit of the country of origin.

nsteel7• 2 years ago

I would like to think it's also partly a message that this move isn't about profit seeking. British companies do not have legal duty to maximise their profit. NYSE investors might not appreciate this foreign idea.

shagie3• 2 years ago

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354

While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.

There is no legal duty to maximize profit.

klelatti• 2 years ago

A peer comment has refuted that there is a duty like this in the US. For the record, it's not true in the UK [1]

In any event, any such duty would be likely to be meaningless. There are so many possible areas of confusion or inconsistency:

- Profit over what time period? - Profit vs shareholder return. - What level of risk is to be taken in generating this profit?

And so on.

[1] http://in-houseblog.practicallaw.com/fallacy-of-the-duty-to-...

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

Does it matter any longer which exchange things are listed on? I can trade any stock on any exchange regardless of where it is. I guess only trading hours and holiday schedule would make a difference.

kjellsbells• 2 years ago

At volume, the stamp tax on UK stock would be significant.

More fundamentally companies tend to be valued higher on the US exchanges, which gives companies a bit more freedom of action to raise capital from the market to fund their plans.

I don't think UK Gov will cry too much abount RPi. They certainly would be leaning hard on the board of, say, Shell, if that corporation decided to list abroad instead of London (as their former CEO has mooted).

patmorgan23• 2 years ago

Taxes and currency exchange factor in.

US has very strong and deep capital markets. There's a reason New York has been the financial capital of the world for the last 100 years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

dukeyukey5• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what the real disadvantage is though. Like, as a British person I can easily buy shares in companies listed in the US. If a British company IPOs on the NYSE but keeps it's HQ and most employees in the UK, does that actually say anything about the UK economy, or just a bit about the LSE specifically and maybe some corporate law details?

rchaud• 2 years ago

The stock would be denominated in another currency, and the amount of your capital gains would be affected by forex rates.

dheera• 2 years ago

I just wish they would let Pi users in on pre-IPO shares like Reddit

manojlds• 2 years ago

Hopefully the proposed British ISA will help make things better.

graemep2• 2 years ago

I'm pleased to see another British company actually stick to the London Stock Exchange. Many are starting to list themselves on the US stock market, Arm being at the top of my mind in terms of tech.

London has never attracted tech companies. Even when I was in the field over 20 years ago the combined market cap of tech was tiny. Only smallish British companies IPOed on London.

ARM was small when it originally listed. Now it is large and was not British owned - why would they list in London.

It just seems everything in the business world is becoming more centralised around the US.

Financial markets centralise for liquidity. IIRC some dual listed European companies are moving to London.

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

It's (slowly) changing.

Chinese companies are now considering LSE as an alternative to NYSE/NASDAQ for their dual-listing IPOs due to laxer oversight and auditing requirements, especially now that FCPA enforcement is in full swing and third party audits by Western organizations are required, which Chinese regulators are preventing.

That said, it's hard to beat the primacy of the American, Chinese, Singaporean, and increasingly Indian market (at least 2 late stage startups ik in the Bay Area are looking at listing on the NSE because they want to IPO but $100-200M in ARR and consistent growth is not enough to successfully list in the US anymore).

alangibson2• 2 years ago

There is a lot of general flight to safety in the US, but I think the UK is a special case. The UKs economic decline is irreversible at this point. Crumbling (literally) infrastructure, completely isolated elites, out of the EU, inability to build basically anything. Why hang around to find out where the bottom is...

notanormalnerd• 2 years ago

I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.

This also signals very clear to investors what this enterprise is about.

Latty• 2 years ago

Isn't this already how it works? Raspberry Pi Ltd is a different company to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

syarb• 2 years ago

AFAIK, yep. Jeff Geerling (hi jeff!) has a great video about this. https://youtu.be/hrhE6MnGi1A?si=IeHs2GKYqPjqPXSb&t=305

gchadwick2• 2 years ago

This is already the setup, the foundation owns the trading company and it is the trading company going to IPO.

From a quick scan it's not clear to me what share of ownership of RPi ltd the foundation would retain post IPO other than the foundation will be selling at least some of its stake:

The Offer would be comprised of new Shares to be issued by the Company and existing shares to be sold by certain existing shareholders, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi's existing majority shareholder.

anticensor• 2 years ago

Are non-profits allowed to own any stock in publicly traded companies in Britain?

michaelt4• 2 years ago

I think a better way would be to keep the foundation and spin off a company that manufactures all of that. Sell 49% of that company in an IPO and keep the majority stake in the foundation. This way they can raise money for expansion while keeping the mission in line.

Ah yes, the OpenAI approach :)

torlok7• 2 years ago

What are the economics of buying into a stock that has a 51% stakeholder, and doesn't pay dividends, outside of "line goes up"?

I know this is kind of a standard in tech, but it still eludes me where the value of the stock is.

cchance• 2 years ago

LOL you act like the entire market isn't "line goes up" regardless of 51% or not.

And no its not just tech

Jolter• 2 years ago

Why would they not pay dividends?

andrewla• 2 years ago

Traditional answer is that there is future potential that they would issue more stock (to sacrifice their 51% stake) or at some point start to issue dividends.

dukeyukey5• 2 years ago

Raspberry Pi has paid out about $50 million in dividends already to it's parent company.

vasco9• 2 years ago

Line goes up is the same as dividends. If you genuinely don't know, you can easily find the reason why it's economically the same, while being fiscally more efficient to not emit dividends by doing a quick googling.

szundi3• 2 years ago

I’m not really sure you get what the smell of money does to most people

tombert4• 2 years ago

My visceral reaction to this was “well shit, RPi was supposed to be a non profit to lower the costs of computers, and now they’re going to be another boring computer company”, and that makes me sad. I know that Rapsberry Pi has been a dual for-profit and non-profit for quite awhile, so in theory nothing really changes, but it feels a bit weird.

However, it appears that unambiguously for-profit companies have managed to make affordable SBCs (e.g. Hardkernel, Nvidia), without having the same constraints of trying to save the world associated with it. Maybe Raspberry Pi IPOing will increase availability and funding?

Tough to say. I haven’t actually used a name-brand Raspberry Pi for awhile, and have opted for a competitor for the last several years.

vsnf• 2 years ago

I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.

k8sToGo• 2 years ago

Not well suited for NAS at all. Too limited in IO and PCI lanes.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

Also not really suited for Plex, since the transcode performance would be awful.

ta9883• 2 years ago

Depends so much what's on the NAS.

StillBored• 2 years ago

Right, the IO perf has been bad.

But IMHO, no one should be running a NAS without ECC at this point. It's on the "my RAID doesn't scrub the disks" level; it's just begging for silent disk corruption that propagates its way through backups and is impossible to fix with software solutions.

LtWorf• 2 years ago

I have home automation done with rpi.

They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.

dotnet00• 2 years ago

Similar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.

borbtactics• 2 years ago

I use my 3B solely for adblocking via Pi-hole and it works fine most of the time

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

R Pi in a nutshell. Three sigma and proud of it! :)

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

I think they are mostly for hobbyists and students so maybe being pragmatic is not the top concern.

nsbk• 2 years ago

Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net

amatecha• 2 years ago

Hilariously I've spent hours troubleshooting why my Pi running Pi-hole is intermittently inaccessible from my iPhone, despite being able to connect to the Pi from other machines. I still have no clue why. Last night I finally captured a tcpdump so maybe I can see what is happening (the Pi is indeed receiving packets from the iPhone), but it's totally inexplicable. The other Pi I have always hooked up (music player for my speakers) has a bash script that runs every 5 min with cron, to ping the LAN router and restart networking if it can't ping it. Why? Because after a while the Pi would randomly drop off the network and become inaccessible. Countless stuff online gives various troubleshooting which never made any difference, until I employed my hackish "check the network every 5min" which has completely "solved" the problem. Unfortunately this didn't "solve" the problem for the Pi running Pi-hole, sadly.

pzo• 2 years ago

I wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.

walteweiss2• 2 years ago

Won’t a tiny/small PC would solve that use-case? E.g. a nettop.

lode• 2 years ago

I am running a hypervisor (https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-...) on my Raspberry Pi 4. Rock solid.

Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole

All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.

I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

Doesn't Synology support running VMs directly on the NAS itself?

tetris11• 2 years ago

Run an email server, send triggers on subject keywords, automate stuff.

ssl-37• 2 years ago

A Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad).

If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper.

If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper.

But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.)

Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable.

---

For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.)

Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.

bityard• 2 years ago

Sounds like a lack of imagination to me!

The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/

The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com

graphe5• 2 years ago

Absolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience.

Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.

jcronenberg• 2 years ago

One thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

But neither requires a GPU.

sneak• 2 years ago

home assistant and small/quiet/cheap remote syncthing nodes.

gmiller1234563• 2 years ago

    I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi.

The practical purposes for an RPi have diminished. They're still good for when you need something small, light or low power. But the market for refurb mini-PCs really replaces most of the instances where you're just looking for a cheap, but semi-powerful, computer.

And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.

meatmanek• 2 years ago

And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.

Especially with ESPHome making it so easy to integrate with common sensors without writing code.

That said, the Pi Zero W is pretty cheap and small (similar in size to many ESP32 development boards) so it provides a nice upgrade path if you want to do more processing on device, exceed a few megabytes of ram, etc

moffkalast7• 2 years ago

And the Pi Foundation's refusal to do literally any power management while increasing TDP into the sky with marginal efficiency improvements has diminished its use for robotics and other battery powered applications too.

This has just been one of my largest pet peeves with the entire Pi lineup. The Pi 5 is the worst offender that idles at like 3 watts doing jack shit. That's an entire 3000mAh battery gone in under four hours that would've easily lasted several days on an average smartphone SOC with twice the memory and speed.

rocky1138• 2 years ago

I use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

There are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too":

IP KVM as with the Pi KVM.

It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely).

Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things.

Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.

kstrauser• 2 years ago

I run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

It seems well suited for making a NAS

No ECC memory, thus no.

staringback• 2 years ago

I can't remember the last time I actually used a Raspberry Pi. These days there are millions of cheaper, more powerful, "Raspberry Pi compatible" boards that are actually stocked. I don't see any reason to even need one of these in 2024.

pmontra• 2 years ago

I also never looked at RPi 4s and 5s but for a different reason. Cheaper is good but I don't need "more powerful".

I'm using a 3B+ (or whatever) with a TV hat to convert free to air channels to IP streams that I can watch on my phone and tablet. The winning point is obviously the TV hat but also the low power consumption. It's 3.82 W right now.

I'm also using an Odroid as my home server, because there where no RPis available and because I can plug two SATA 3 disks in that machine. It's using 3.71 W. Given the load I put on it I could be OK with a less powerful server that would consume even less Watts.

theonealtair• 2 years ago

Raspberry Pi did a lot to revolutionize the micro board/pc market, they truly had an amazing influence on the industry that I’m grateful for. Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered, and their influence spurred a new market that has produced much better alternatives. This IPO just confirms this perspective for me. Thank you raspberry pi for what you did. But I doubt I’ll ever want to buy one again.

azinman23• 2 years ago

What are the better alternatives? I don’t think any have anywhere near the level of software and community support nor stability.

jsheard4• 2 years ago

The situation with ARM hasn't changed much unless your budget stretches to Amperes stuff, but the big change is that x86 SBCs and mini-PCs have gotten very cheap, and of course those Just Work with any Linux distro or even Windows. The Intel N100 is incredibly capable for the price.

eloisant• 2 years ago

The Raspberry Pi is the best if you can find it at MSRP, but I haven't seen that for many years now. You can only find it for at least double and at that price it's not worth it.

There are many alternatives that, granted, don't have a community as big as RPi, but are perfectly valid and can be found at a normal price.

pokstad• 2 years ago

Intel chips are becoming dirt cheap. Intel has a lot of cheap dev boards that are more robust than RPi. Maybe not the same level of community support. Recently I bought a refurbished Intel micro size desktop PC to replace my RPi home server.

haunter2• 2 years ago

In Europe you can get one with a 6th gen i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and SSD for ~100€. And of course you can upgrade the CPU for something better, add 32 GB RAM, bigger storage etc.

No GPIO pins though.

II2II• 2 years ago

It depends upon how you look at it. Something like the Raspberry Pi is considerably more expensive. On the other hand, they started with a very low performance and weak feature set and have evolved into a product with good performance and a much richer feature set. Something like the Raspberry Pi Zero is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi, and its price is much closer to the original Raspberry Pi. Much of the price bloating features were a product of customer request. To be fair, they dropped many hints that it would increase the cost of the product.

From my understanding, support has also improved over the years. Raspberry Pi always had a bit of an edge in community support, but they also had a push to develop free resources for education markets and hobbyists. The former has been traditionally been a high-priced add-on. The latter has traditionally been provided by third parties (more reasonably priced, but still at extra cost). None of this has disappeared, though it does appear to be less prominent than in the past.

I think the big change is in the competition. SBCs were traditionally high cost poorly supported products or even higher cost well supported products (though you were unlikely to get support unless you were a business). Now we have a flood of low cost poorly supported products, albeit with slightly higher standards for support than in times past.

Pxtl4• 2 years ago

They've always felt overpriced to me imho - not intrinsically at the sticker-price level, but the workarounds needed to obtain constantly-out-of-stock units, get good-enough on/off functionality, good-enough power-supply, good-enough SD cards eliminated the savings of the device itself being cheap.

I actually appreciate that the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem, and would be willing to pay the premium price for that when I'm interested in buying a new SBC.

kllrnohj2• 2 years ago

I think the price has stealthily increased as the required dressings got more demanding. Like the initial pi could be powered by any random phone charger you had laying around. But the new ones are a lot more picky and demanding. The new one also really demands a cooling solution, which is yet another cost the old one didn't have without being an actual MSRP increase.

By the time you fully dress a pi now it's like $100-130. The pi itself is only like half the cost if that.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

the Pi5 has finally solved the on/off problem

Please do tell.

9999000009995• 2 years ago

You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.

pquki42• 2 years ago

I think they are referring to those mini PCs -- either new ones from Chinese brands with Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.

megous3• 2 years ago

You pay for the OS support.

No you don't. RPi5, zero upstream Linux support 7 months after release.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5

Zillion dollar (pound?) company, apparently, and they rely on some volunteers from SUSE for even basic upstreaming. If you're paying them for OS support, you're throwing out the money.

Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.

No they are not. If anything it was always RPi that was its own quirky thing.

Pretty much all of my SBCs are some form of mainline U-Boot booting mainline Linux (sometimes + a few patches) and a standard Linux userspace. Very uniform.

RPi 2+ I have is some weird bootloader that doesn't fit the wider SBC ecosystem, with its own special configuration, and a lot of RPi only tooling to control their firmware running on the graphics CPU or whatever.

hilbert42• 2 years ago

I agree, and I would add that I think this IPO is the beginning of the end of what we were used to.

The company will end up the way many companies go after an IPO, the importance of product drops in relation to that of shareholder profit.

klysm• 2 years ago

What are the much better alternatives? I’m not really aware of any

Narishma• 2 years ago

Now a days they feel overpriced and underpowered

They've been underpowered since day 1. That hasn't stopped them being successful.

webdoodle• 2 years ago

Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions. I'd very much like to see a new PI that doesn't have wifi, bluetooth or any other wireless technology.

azinman23• 2 years ago

Why? They had that with the zero… I’m guessing those sold a lot less.

gmiller1234563• 2 years ago

They have specifically limited consumer's ability to purchase the Zero's, so there's definately more demand for them than they're selling.

Yeroc• 2 years ago

I don't see any connection between going public and giving the average consumer more input into the direction of the company. Making a company public means the company is beholden to operating in a way that maximizes return to the shareholders. Sure an average consumer can buy shares in the company but the average consumer isn't going to be sitting on the board.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

Hopefully this will give the average consumer the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions.

Will give the average investor the ability to give some direction as to the development of new versions.

azinman23• 2 years ago

Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever, instead of functioning on their mission and doing what’s right. This may mean moving manufacturing to China, using lower cost components, etc etc.

graphe5• 2 years ago

What is "right"? They haven't been a good value for over 2 years.

advisedwang• 2 years ago

The goal hasn't ever been about producing a device cheaply. It's about supporting education, encouraging tinkering and changing attitudes [1]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/

ianburrell3• 2 years ago

Good value for what? They have never been good value as desktops because the early ones were too slow. Now there are better little computers.

But as hobby computer, they are still a good value. There are faster boards and cheaper boards, but which ones are good? More importantly, which ones will be supported in five years? How easy it to install software? I read about distro that promises support, but then have to check the list of hardware it supports.

I have six year old Pi 3. I can install latest 64-bit OS on it. For my plans, something small and low power is an advantage.

marginalia_nu2• 2 years ago

Yeah. I just don't see how they could possibly grow in a way that satisfies the stock market. The only way to create an appearance of such growth is to go Boeing and essentially burn down the house for warmth. For an organization like this, it's basically always step one on an irreversible death spiral.

bongodongobob6• 2 years ago

From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed. The company that makes the big fancy automated machines also make the simpler auxillary ones that supplement their main offerings. Since they know how to build with PLCs, that's what they use instead of sticking a Pi or some small form PC in it instead. Stuff like barcode readers on a manufacturing line or some simple piece of QA equipment at the end of the line measuring the height of a bottle or something. Adds thousands of dollars to the BoM but is complete overkill.

pxx• 2 years ago

The first order bit of better outreach is a low price point, which they've completely lost the plot on.

If going public is what takes them to realize it, I'll cheer it on.

WorkerBee28474• 2 years ago

Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever

Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.

jchiu1106• 2 years ago

Lower cost of components doesn't mean lower quality. What made the cost lower is logistics and the availability of components within the region.

opyate• 2 years ago

Yup, cue the imminent enshittification. E.g. your Pi6 will require sign-in and come with ads.

rvz• 2 years ago

That prediction was just too easy [0], and it has now been finally admitted.

Time to them to dump their shares on the community.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28773122

buildbuildbuild• 2 years ago

I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.

Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.

If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.

imhoguy• 2 years ago

I would go even further - open specs and mass recycle billions of chips and boards of any obsolete mobile device (Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple....).

moffkalast7• 2 years ago

"Over my rotting corpse."

- Tim Cook, probably

rpmisms• 2 years ago

Let's normalize private industry again.

dukeyukey5• 2 years ago

My pension contributions need to go somewhere, and without a flow of new companies going public it's just gonna bid up and up the price of the old guard.

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

For real. I want more companies like Valve. Not publicly traded, not trying to squeeze every last dollar for the sake of it, just doing what they think is cool when they want to do it.

nsteel7• 2 years ago

There was a good interview with Eben Upton back in Feb on this topic (and others): https://hackaday.com/2024/02/28/floss-weekly-episode-772-ras...

MarkusWandel3• 2 years ago

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen the words "Shareholder Value". Hopefully that particular disease can be kept away for a while.

incahoots• 2 years ago

The disease of Enshittification ?

MarkusWandel3• 2 years ago

Whatever you call it, when you're beholden to the shareholders rather than your customers.

Karellen• 2 years ago

Friedman's Malady

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

ArtTimeInvestor2• 2 years ago

That would be cool. I would like to follow their journey. Their numbers, their earning calls etc.

I would like to see more smaller tech companies on the stock market. The giants like Microsoft and Google are way to hard to understand because they have so many products and so much stuff in the pipeline.

Are there any interesting examples of smaller tech companies which are publicly traded?

nicce• 2 years ago

Not so sure.

Interesting opposite: Valve

Superior money milking machine without the pressure from shareholders, because they can focus into the benefits of the end users with few products and long term sustainability.

No need to rush for increased profits every quarter so that someone can sell or admire their stocks.

ArtTimeInvestor2• 2 years ago

Valve has a market cap of about $8B though. Quite big already.

Also, I don't understand games at all :)

throwaway5959• 2 years ago

Wild how far they are from their original stated goals. Maybe they were just full of it the whole time.

mig39• 2 years ago

Enshittification incoming.

revscat• 2 years ago

Please no. They make good, beloved products that are fairly high quality.

Nux• 2 years ago

How the enshittification begins..

muyuu• 2 years ago

that would explain the focus on services like the VNC replacement they've released

those won't be free for long

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

Intel N100 has sent raspberry pi to the drawer.

ein0p2• 2 years ago

It’s like $100 per board now once you add a power supply and a case. More if you also add storage. Cheapest Intel system on Amazon is $139. The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.

TechDebtDevin• 2 years ago

I don't think inflation is Rasberry Pi Ltds fault.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

I don't think inflation is RPi's excuse either. It affects Intel too you know.

knowaveragejoe2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, a Pi zero is <$10. I remember them being $1 at Microcenter for a time.

Is the cheapest Intel system as power sipping as the Pi's?

ein0p2• 2 years ago

Pi is not particularly “power sipping” either. Not every usb brick is capable of powering today’s Pi’s, which indicates peak power draw of over 5W.

margalabargala8• 2 years ago

Here's a 6W, $99 intel system: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...

An $80 Pi 5 is 25W.

mbesto• 2 years ago

The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability

No, not really. If it was just affordability you could buy a used ProLiant server for the same price on Facebook Marketplace and have 20x the computing power.

Raspi has been about the perfect balance of: power consumption, affordability, form factor, and computational capability all in one.

If you can manage your project with a unit that is roughly 2x the form factor, you can get the same power consumption (less?!) with an N100, at the same cost, but double the processing power: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...

georgeecollins• 2 years ago

I think the real differentiator is support. There is so much hardware and software support for Raspbery Pi. This is why I use them.

mike_d3• 2 years ago

No, it was absolutely about affordability and education. Pi was never about compute power, it was focused on a general purpose CPU that ran Linux and had I/O that enabled tinkering.

They lost their way trying to cater to businesses that wanted Pis to drive digital signage or be the basis of some IoT deployment.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity [...] We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."

https://web.archive.org/web/20110506002027/https://www.raspb...

genman• 2 years ago

False. I was an early adopter and the price was the main point of RPi - there were also more powerful and expensive boards from different companies.

margalabargala8• 2 years ago

The lower-end, power-efficient market is being rapidly devoured by the ESP32. A $20 Pi will still use much more power than an ESP32 while also being less reliable and still 3x the price.

The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.

Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.

EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...

Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.

writeslowly• 2 years ago

The ESP32 seems like a very different product to me. The pi has megabytes/gigabytes of memory and can reasonably run linux. Were people really using them for the same things?

nsteel7• 2 years ago

They designed and built their own microcontroller. This chasing performance narrative doesn't make sense.

And let's be real, it doesn't have 25W power consumption. You can attach enough things to it to get to 25W if you try really hard but that's hardly the same thing. The latest cheapo Intel parts are contenders (at ~10W, where the pi 5 actually operates) and if you just want perf you're better off with that. But if you want a low-level connectivity, a rich community, docs, and tailor-made projects, you still want a pi.

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

That’s probably an N100. Its actual TDP is 15 watts, but it works reasonably well when capped at 6W.

They are good devices, but they are bigger than Pi and are whiny. Their fans never turns off and creates background noise. I have quite a few of them.

On the other hand, Pi’s 25W contains tons of overhead for other devices. A 5TB external hard drive still requires way more power than a 1 TB one or an SSD.

arnavpraneet• 2 years ago

To pile on here, every Pi I have used (like a dozen at this point) worked fine for years, Pi 5 bricked itself randomly within 4 months of purchase with the complete accessory sets installed (coolers/case etc.) Left a bad taste to blow my savings as a student on the newest and greatest Pi to tinker around with, and it bricks, when the second hand heavily used 4s and 3Bs work fine with constant years of use.

sitzkrieg• 2 years ago

the rpi has had no power management controls forever. they dont care

CMCDragonkai• 2 years ago

What about the Nano Pi?

geokon2• 2 years ago

The ESP32 is not the real threat. The real threat are new integrated chips from small Chinese companies that are coming down the pipeline - like the SG2002. They run RISC-V, have integrated RAM and run Linux.

They greatly simplify the whole SBC and effectively bridging the gap between RPis and Arduino - in cost and easy of use

It's not a full desktop experience, but they're running full Ubuntu - so you code on your laptop and it'll run on the thing - run whatever language you want and blink lights, shoot out emails or do whatever other hobby projects you want using your desktop dev environment. No fiddling with icky micro Arduino/ESP32 libs.

RPi have shown themselves to be a Broadcom shop - so their product direction is dictated by Broadcom's chip offerings

Example: LicheeRV Nano

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...

analog31• 2 years ago

I've used both RPi and microcontrollers, though my last RPi purchase was for a unit that's been running my home file server for years.

My thought is that they cater to different uses, because RPi (and its ilk) support an operating system. So you can decide whether you need or want an OS or not. For instance my file server benefits from all of the networking, file system, and so forth, of Linux. It supports, at the very least, a workable UI for setup and diagnostics via SSH and a terminal program.

A microcontroller is preferable for applications where you don't need a full blown OS, and where the size, cost, or power consumption of something like an RPi are burdens.

In some cases, an RPi is overkill but provides the convenience of hosting things like onboard dev tools. And unit cost isn't as much of an issue if you're not planning on selling or duplicating something. And an additional option is a microcontroller running as a peripheral to a full blown PC, where you get the benefits of the GPIO, but the comfort of desktop software tools.

My general advice for those getting into hardware-related hacking is to give both a try and develop your own taste for which one is preferable for which use.

chillingeffect• 2 years ago

I thought the point of RPi s easy connectivity to spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio with a powerful(1) filesystem and network stack behind it. What easy way to give a NUC spi, i2c, pwm, and gpio?

(1) esp-idf is not in the same league as linux.

tskguarantee• 2 years ago

Adafruit sells a $15 board to let you use spi, i2c and gpio over USB. It also has their connector for easy i2c expansion with their family of sensors and breakouts.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Latest Raspberry Pis are expensive but also quite powerful. If you want a cheap single board computer that can run Linux, you have the Pi Zero ($15). You also have the Pico ($4), which is an alternative to the ESP32.

m4633• 2 years ago

They cost more than that on amazon.

lannisterstark• 2 years ago

You can get a SFFPC with 7th Gen i5 for like $40. Apart from low power cost and form factor (and I guess gpio), you would probably just get the SFFPC

1-6• 2 years ago

And overall size. I hope they build more smaller form factors like the Pico and the Zero. That's what differentiates them and the rest.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

The whole point of the entire thing was its affordability. That was kind of lost along the way.

Now the point is about the coolness factor. Which is measured by the Euclidean distance from architecture X to x86.

copperx• 2 years ago

Affordability is gone, sure. But there are many other virtues of the platform. Low heat, power consumption, heat, weight, physical dimensions, and integration.

rychco• 2 years ago

Farewell Raspberry Pi.

What are some alternative boards with comparable specs?

neop1x2• 2 years ago

Risc-V boards soon maybe. See Lichee Pi 4a (https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a).

Kye• 2 years ago

Hiring a proud surveillance cop to sell surveillance cop stuff to governments must have been a boon if they're considering an IPO. Zero consequences for being assholes to critics then lying about the criticism to the press.

chrisjj15• 2 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zh51l4/raspberr...

szundi3• 2 years ago

jamesy0ung2• 2 years ago

Can you buy the shares in Australia?

decryption• 2 years ago

Not sure how you get in on the IPO, but once they list on the LSE it'll be quite trivial to buy shares on the usual platforms like Stake, SelfWealth, CommSec, etc. Not much different than buying on the ASX.

jamesy0ung2• 2 years ago

Thanks mate!

lrvick• 2 years ago

Do not do it!

The mission was always to produce quality low cost computers for hobbyists and kids with open source software.

The moment you IPO you will have shareholders demanding you put profit before people and the users will always lose in that deal.

taylorfinley• 2 years ago

On top of that, IMO the vast majority of their value as a brand comes from the community that develops for and with the platform. See every review for the alternative SBC market (Orange Pi, Bana Pi, etc.) "Sure it's better/cheaper but they don't have the huge community..."

So, if they IPO, will they first be distributing equity to the community? Or are they just cash-grabbing a retirement play?

exadeci• 2 years ago

Pine64 has been doing much better in that matter for years, I've had a Pine64 since 2016 and a raspberry pi 4 running the same OS (dietpi) and software kept running hotter even though it got released 3 years later and for double the price

bmitc• 2 years ago

It doesn't even matter to me. I stopped using them personally and have been pushing back against them professionally. They have bad performance, bad thermals, many limitations in the peripherals, are not reliable, and are impossible to get.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

And have a long history of hardware design mistakes.

On top of that, Eben Upton has publicly made statements showing pointless loyalty to ARM and ignorance on current/past developments in RISC-V.

For Raspberry Pi to stay relevant, many things would have to change.

smcleod• 2 years ago

Same old story, the customer will shift from the people buying it to the shareholders. This would be a shame.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

And will be bought by private equity and rode into the ground not long after.

system2• 2 years ago

IPO means company already gone shit. I will stick to ESP32.

ntnsndr• 2 years ago

This is why we need Exit to Community: https:/.e2c.how

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

It seems to me RPi kind of lost the attributes that made it interesting in the first place.

phendrenad22• 2 years ago

Why don't they license their name to other entities, essentially allow approved clones? Muddying your non-profit goal by operating a for-profit, publicly-traded company seems suboptimal.

t43562• 2 years ago

The Pi isn't one thing - it's a group of computers at different prices - you can develop on the expensive one and run your production code on a much cheaper one.

blastersyndrome• 2 years ago

It seems I lost my faith in Raspberry Pis a lot sooner than most people. I gave up on them around the RPi3 days because it stopped working with the random chargers I had just laying around my house. I traced the issue back to my power supply having too much voltage ripple, with it still being within the spec for USB. Essentially, I needed to run it with their charger which was built to work better than industry standard.

This, coupled with the mini HDMI ports basically requiring an adapter, means that you more than total the cost of the Pi just in peripherals to get it up and running. It all seems like a waste of money anymore.

fragmede• 2 years ago

No, your random USB power supplies were just particularly shitty. It doesn't need to be their power supply, it just needs to not be a piece of crap.

agreed that mini HDMI is bullshit.

running a company and pricing things is a dark art. there's so much psychology to it, getting you in the door at $40, then up charging for add ons is a time honored tradition sales tactic. win or lose, judge it on the out-the-door price as long as you compare it to the out-the-door price of other options (Intel NUC, Droid, orange Pi, any NAS)

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

a weird source to receive this news, nevertheless it seems that this is another evolution of the commercial arm of the company.

there can still be potential benefits of this move for the foundation's goals. economies of scale and increased commercial embedded use cases can push for adoption of ARM in basic computing.

i just hope that they finally set up their own distribution as it is still a pain to buy their devices for a fair price.

Raspberry Pi Ltd is considering an IPO

Related Stories