Hacker News Reader

> Maybe I had bad luck, maybe I happened to get 6 (I had multiple of certain Pis) defective boards but they always felt "unstable" to me.

I've never had bad boards but I've had similar experiences like this, it's always turned out to be a power supply issue, or a counterfit sd card. Can't say I know what your experience will be but those are the places I'd look at first before the board.

> During COVID (maybe before as well) it came out that the company was prioritizing bulk sales over sales to individuals (or rather sales to companies that resold to individuals) which soured me.

If you go watch some of the interviews on this, it was a combination of things:

1) Supply chain issues, like everything during COVID, they couldn't keep up manufacturing capacity.

2) They weren't favoring resellers, but were favoring "industrial" or "commercial" (whatever you want to call them) customers because of pre-existing contracts that they had to fulfill or it'd kill them since they'd have to pay fines or deal with contract disputes. Since it was more guaranteed revenue it also helped them keep the lights on without just shutting down at the time too.

Still didn't feel great either at the time, but I'd say that the way you put it reads as mis-charactarising what happened as being a purely profit motivate thing.

I think they were trying to stop resellers price gouging during the chip shortage crisis. On ebay you could buy Pis for well over what they were available for on first-party sites (just like PlayStation 5s!).

As a counterpoint, they let me buy Pis as an individual, but I had to send in a picture of myself with a dated piece of paper like a Reddit AMA to prove I was legit.

FWIW there are Pi alternatives without the branding, but usually for the super low price point mini-PCs you are after you need to go to China to firms like Beelink...

They could have just raised the prices for individual customers themselves instead of creating a massive opportunity to price gouge.

Prioritizing bulk orders sounds like they just didn't want to be the front-end.

Sounds like problems with the sdcard, and that really is a problem. If your OS is not read-only (which isn't a simple or practical setup) it'll eventually wear out from constant logging and die. That might be part of the instability you saw.

So far the solution for long term stability is either that or to get a USB/PCIe NVMe instead. eMMC would be a good solution which is why nearly every single other SBC manufacturer supports it, but of course the Pi foundation stubbornly refuses to touch it because...?

Maybe just to annoy us.

I thought so as well, that's why my latest RPi setup used this case [0] with this [2] expansion board. I still had instability. I didn't cheap out on the SD cards I bought either. I threw lots of money at a "cheap" board to try to improve reliability but just never got there.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WP8WC3V/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP