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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Do the modern Pi Zeros not compete with the original Pi at a stupid low price?

Not really, the small size adds the need for all kinds of adapters to have the same functionality.

No need for the wifi and bt dongles anymore, are they are integrated in the Zero 2 W. You can connect keyboard and mouse either via bt or via a single usb otg dongle to connect a wireless keyboard/mouse set or a keyboard with integrated usb hub. In my opinion this is superior to the original B. And far superior to the original A anyway, while still being cheaper. Remember even the original B had just two USB ports, so in practice you needed an extra hub almost always, because of missing functionality that is now integrated.

It depends on the use case. I have several I put around the house with sensors for IoT stuff. ESP32/8266 (and newer) devices would probably be less expensive since they don't need an SD card but are more work to program. The Zero has a full OS with dev tools built in. But for running a desktop, they're not so good.

They're not as cheap any more at $15US for the Zero W. I miss the days when Microcenter had them on sale for $3.14US on Pi day. They did recently have them priced at $10 to celebrate the grand opening of a new store.

The Pi Zero 1 performance is pretty bad and it doesn't support 64bit OSes (so no Ubuntu). The Pi Zero 2 looks pretty decent for the price, performance should be ok-ish and it'll run Ubuntu... if you could actually get one.

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