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Comment by trome | Hacker News Reader

So, how is the competitive with Xunlong and FriendlyARM making the OrangePi Zero and the Nanopi Neo? It seems to have less I/O and still not have a libre stack, unlike the Allwinner H3.

Is the Raspberry Pi Foundation just coasting on branding at this point to sell products?

Edit: On another note, will the Raspberry Pi Foundation stick with this very limited SOC ad infinium? It seems like a poor choice for a single board computer, you really want I/O and low power usage, but it doesn't deliver on either.

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Not just branding - also Pi fans at sites like Hackaday which downplay and dismiss any competing boards. For example, compare Brian Benchoff's article a year ago which argues the C.H.I.P. has been rendered irrelevant because it's $9 and the Pi Zero is $5 while ignoring the fact one has WiFi, with his article today arguing that this is a major step forward because $10 with WiFi is really cheaper than $5 without it while omitting any mention of the similarly-priced boards with WiFi that preceded it:

http://hackaday.com/2016/02/28/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-...

http://hackaday.com/2017/02/28/10-raspberry-pi-zero-w-the-w-...

I bought 2 CHIPs, disappointed. Spec sheet is perfect, but it's not raspberry pi. glitches (sudden full system shutdown when servo turns a little bit faster), and lack of quality drivers/software to work reliably.

If you need a raspberry pi, just buy a raspberry pi.

The CHIP had ridiculous postage fees, CHIP + the keyboard/display thingy would've been close to 100€ to get here.

Not worth it.

> Is the Raspberry Pi Foundation just coasting on branding at this point to sell products?

I don't believe beating competition by selling more products was ever part of the RPi Foundation mission statement. The way how I see it, existence of competing products primarily benefits a minority technically-oriented community, not their intended primary audience.

Eh, it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation has strayed from an org that started out building SBCs so kids could have a computer to tinker on, and are now entirely focused on being Broadcom's PR and Sales engine. The system on a module was definitely not created with kids in mind, nor was the open GPU driver.

Kids don't care that a Broadcom SoC powers the RPi, nor do they care about kernel level nuances. I believe you've conflated the interests of a minority hacker community with the RPi Foundation's overarching mission of making an affordable compute platform accessible to those who otherwise can't afford one for the purpose of furthering the advancement of education.

O_o Well, I really don't know what to say to you, if your ever in Seattle gimme a holler and I'll introduce you to a room full of kids who are not fans of low quality, closed software.

And I'll raise you a school full of kids who couldn't care less.

And those kids who couldn't care less probably have never used Linux or a single board computer.

Extremely competitive.

The WiFi on the OPi Zero and Neo Air are awful; borderline unusable. (You're talking ~3Mbit in a non-noisy environment with poor range).

The Pi Zero W has the same chip as the model B which has an excellent reputation.

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