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A lot of people seem to want something like a more-powerful Arduino that they can interface to a few I2C or SPI sensors, run some relays or servos, and embed into a project. Use your old cell phone charger, buy a microSD for $5, borrow a keyboard and some time on an HDMI TV to configure wifi, then just access it through VNC.

Before the Pi3 with it's built-in wifi, it was also common to connect the Pi to a laptop with an ethernet cable and access it that way.

For some people, one of those cheap X86 systems would make more sense, because they're trying to use it as a desktop or to do something that benefits from a higher-power CPU (real-time object recognition comes to mind). For a lot of others, a little ARM board hits a few important points: it's small, doesn't use much power, is easy to re-flash if it gets corrupted, is actually available in their country, is generally easy to adapt Arduino code to work on, and has a huge community around it focused on learning, experimentation, and building things.

There's a nice little niche that it and similar boards fill.

Yeah, it's nice for some embedded use-cases too but don't forget there's also BeagleBone Black and some other tools that fit that use-case as well. Or just a Bus Pirate in some situations. Depends on what you want to do. It's nice for some video things that really whale on the GPIOs.

The "it's easy to reflash" thing really grinds me because it's just as easy to image any other type of disk too. Yeah, the BIOS is on the disk too, but that actually increases the chance of an accident since you can nuke it out with a disk operation. It's legitimately hard to nuke a conventional BIOS unless you're trying, and in theory UEFI should block writes of invalid firmware images (one of the rare happy side effects of the cryptographic signing).

"using your old cellphone charger" is one of those things that sounds great in theory but you should actually never do in practice. The Pi takes a lot of power and needs much more voltage stability than a charging circuit. Using a random charger is asking for corruption issues because the SD card will silently fail writes.

For object recognition, check out the Jetson TK1 and TX1 boards. They're more expensive than a Pi but CUDA GPU acceleration buys you a LOT more performance and you still fit into a tight power budget.

> Yeah, it's nice for some embedded use-cases too but don't forget there's also BeagleBone Black

Agreed, along with dozens of other {Fruit} Pis, Udoos, Odroids, etc. I like the BBB because it has those separate processors that can be used for tasks with real-time priority.

> it's just as easy to image any other type of disk too.

In theory, yes, but there's something nice about popping out a microSD, putting it in the adapter it came with, and sliding it into my laptop to re-image (or a USB SD card reader, to image a disk from a Pi host directly). SDs are small, easy to move between machines, and SBCs tend to have their OSes distributed as image files.

In contrast, to take a backup image of the computer that I just bought, I needed to download + flash an OS on a USB key, boot, and copy/compress a 256GB disk onto a USB hard drive. It's a lot more steps, a lot more hardware, and there's not a place that I could just download the bare OS image, if I happened to lose the backup. It's just all around a less convenient process.

> [...] sounds great in theory but you should actually never do in practice.

...but that almost everyone does in practice. I haven't personally had an issue with it over 4 years of use.

> For object recognition, check out the Jetson TK1 and TX1 boards. They're more expensive than a Pi but CUDA GPU acceleration buys you a LOT more performance and you still fit into a tight power budget.

A lot of the people especially interested in this are working through a university or technical school class, where the coursework assumes use of a Raspberry Pi, specifically (there seem to be lots of courses like that in India and the Middle East).

When it seems like the use-case fits, I try to point people to other hardware. A lot of people that I talk to about the Pi are from poorer countries though, where a lot of the time "cheap computer" takes precedence over "capable computer". I hear what you're saying though, and I agree: There are a LOT of SBC options out there (and none of the Rasperry Pi computers are necessarily the best technically-suited for most things) and some very nice hardware a couple of price brackets up.

> ...but that almost everyone does in practice. I haven't personally had an issue with it over 4 years of use.

And lots of people have problems with it in practice. Here's a Reddit thread on SD card corruption. #1 top voted and most commonly suggested way to rectify it? Get a better power supply.

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/3how8w/pi_kee...

If you have a name-brand phone charger it'll probably be OK. So will a decent-quality one from Adafruit or another reputable supplier that's intended for this use. But "use a random charger you have laying around" is terrible advice that significantly contributes to the Pi's issues with SD card corruption.

> In theory, yes, but there's something nice about popping out a microSD, putting it in the adapter it came with, and sliding it into my laptop to re-image (or a USB SD card reader, to image a disk from a Pi host directly). SDs are small, easy to move between machines, and SBCs tend to have their OSes distributed as image files.

You can pop out the SSD or HDD and put it in a USB docking cradle and treat it just like a big SD card. A USB 3.0 docking cradle costs a grand total of $15, so there's no reason not to.

And in contrast, the thing with the RPi is that many people find they need to "pop out the SD card and reflash it" a whole lot. The Pi is really bad about SD card corruption and the community has a blase attitude about it.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1275...

Sure you should keep backups, but with the Pi I found myself needing to use them every two months or so. That's an unacceptable level of reliability for desktop or server applications.

> In contrast, to take a backup image of the computer that I just bought, I needed to download + flash an OS on a USB key, boot, and copy/compress a 256GB disk onto a USB hard drive. It's a lot more steps, a lot more hardware, and there's not a place that I could just download the bare OS image, if I happened to lose the backup. It's just all around a less convenient process.

You're making this sound difficult, but the ironic thing is you have to do most of those steps to flash the RPi's SD card with an OS image anyway. Oh wow, downloading an image file and burning it to a USB stick with Rufus, what a struggle. So much harder than downloading an image file and burning it to an SD card using WinImage.

You can store a backup image anywhere you want. Backing up across the network to your desktop computer works just fine. Linux has had Samba for like two decades now and can mount Windows file shares no problem.

In fact you can even take an image of a running filesystem if you want, so you don't even need to do the disk image thing. Wouldn't be my first choice but it's possible.

> I hear what you're saying though, and I agree: There are a LOT of SBC options out there (and none of the Rasperry Pi computers are necessarily the best technically-suited for most things) and some very nice hardware a couple of price brackets up.

It's not even "a couple price brackets up": I paid $75 for my ECS Liva. I paid $85 each for a pair of Liva Xs with the 2/32 configuration. That's within the expected price range to get a basic Pi system going after adding a SD card, high-quality adapter, etc. And you also get GigE, USB 3.0, mSATA, x86 compatibility, etc.

There's other -alikes with eMMC available too, and I'd rather do eMMC than a SD card.

Use the Pi for what it's marketed as: A cheap computer to learn programming on. It's meant to be tinkering-friendly and cheap before reliable, and I think it does those well. I think you put too much emphasis on reliability and too little on convenience, easy access to hardware-specific help from a large community, and the ability to easily talk to external hardware in a microcontroller-ish way. There are things I would always use an ARM SBC for. There are things I would never use an ARM SBC for (but that other people apparently would/do).

I'll keep the ECS systems in mind for future recommendations, though. For anyone that doesn't need the hardware interfaces and doesn't have some external requirement (from a class, etc), they look nice. Do you have a reliable source for the 2/32 Liva X systems at the $85 price point? Amazon and Newegg both are more expensive, at the moment. Slickdeals had a $40 MIR listed (bringing $115 down to $75), but that was last March, and doesn't help me much if I want the hardware now.

RPi boot blobs are going away:

https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

They are still more powerful than if I could combine my old 386SX, Pentium 75 and Pentium 166 into some form of single computer.

I have an Asus EeeBox at home (Atom N270, 1GB RAM), and besides the hard disk vs. MicroSD card, I think my Pi3 is faster than that. (If one includes the GPU in the calculation, it definitely is - with omxplayer, the Pi3 can play 1080p smoothly, while the EeeBox only gets about 5fps on 720p...)

The hybrid old-school machine you propose sounds interesting, though. ;-)

anholt is getting paid by broadcom to write proper open VC4 GPU drivers:

http://anholt.livejournal.com/

Which is the drivers that Fedora is using in their support.