I wish these form factors were more popular with more reputable brands.
Also, the cheapest Mac Mini is $600. The Mini PCs we're discussing are generally sub-$200.
I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2 cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs.
PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new, new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a particular use.
I also just sent a Rockpro64 on a NAS case with 2x25TB disks overseas to my parent's home where it runs as a low powered backup server.
(AI summary for example)
https://bytegiest2.substack.com/p/grok-breaks-down-supermicr...
All of these boards are made in China, so it's no safer strategy to bet on name brands.
Only Apple and a few other brands may have tight enough supply chains to guarantee BOM security.
Also, if these things were out there in such a large supply, I would have expected some hacker would have literally found an old board and found the chip and presented it to the world as evidence.
In terms of a coverup, this was during the first Trump term, and he's not exactly a fan of China, so I don't see any real reason the entire US business and intelligence community would keep it a secret (never mind the fact that if they can keep it a secret... and contact their traditional ways of leaking, not Bloomberg.)
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there has been effectively zero evidence presented.
And I'm not debating the fact that I'm sure it can happen and will happen. But let's stick with facts, not just some rumors.
(This post written without an AI summary.)
12 anonymous testimonies and a story is not zero evidence. Most of the history you are taught in school has a similar bar.
Not an ad for Beelink, just saying they have some awesome little mini pc's that I've used for home lab clusters. Ryzen 9 16C+32T little beasts that are completely silent.
Higher DRAM prices are bound to also affect their unreleased devices and make them a tougher sell to buyers.
"Yeah dude we know but I need a Pi for this project. So sit down."
/s
For anything else, where I just need "small computer running Linux to do a thing over USB or the network", the Intel mini-PCs are still a better deal.
1. They are usually upgradable, either in storage, and/or RAM, WiFi, etc depending on which one you buy.
2. They usually have actual M.2 storage without the need for an add-on board.
3. More sensible board and port layouts. I despise the Pi B form factor. Easily the worst thing about my Radxa X4 is the slavish "lets make it Pi B" form factor, which they didn't even manage to do, so any time I use it it's a port squid mess instead of having everything be neatly managable and I don't get to use any of the Pi B form-factor accessories I have anyways.
4. Can run any x86 operating system, and get installed off of a USB. I dual boot my Radxa X4 between Windows and Linux.
5. Typically have faster networking and definitely better video/NPU hardware. Intel QSV is excellent.
6. Power usage stats that are a rounding error up or down from what a Pi 5 could do.
At this point, I'd rather the Pi Foundation really focus on the Pico stuff, I find it far more interesting. The compute modules are also pretty useful when you really want to customize the I/O. As the landscape changed, the full-size Pi B's just seem...left out. Weird boot process, weird form factor, weird Broadcom stuff, weird price/performance ratio, downright hostile power supply choices (5V5A is supported by like two special snowflake supplies, and guess what, the Pi Foundation sells one!), few upsides. Maybe if the mini-PCs prices still increase, and the Pi Foundation can still get away with selling 8GB Pi 5s at $100 or whatever, it'll make more sense.
To be fair, I haven't messed around with video encoding settings yet. I've seen claims the Pi 5 can do 1080p60 with 50% of the CPU. I could trade off quality for faster encoding, but with a mini PC I could get high quality encoding at real-time speeds.
I'm feeling some buyer's remorse with the Pi 5 right now...
A major selling point of mini PCs is the integrated cooling system, so they run silent. Pi's thermals are terrible, and the active cooling offerings are just garbage.
Connect to https://farside.link, https://lite.cnn.com, https://text.npr.org or gopher://magical.fish as a services portal or news source.
Use mpv+yt-dlp if you are under Unix to watch online videos. Complex? Just a little bit first. Incredibily rewarding later. No JS will be needed to play videos on most websites. Also with yt-dlp you are able to save them for later usage.
Try programming with small languages from https://t3x.org and doing Math/Intro to Statistics book with Klong and its manual. s9fes can be a good enough Scheme Lisp to complete the exircies Concrete Abstractions and maybe SICP if you know how to reimplement (frame) and the missing functions. An easy task after CACS.
Consider SQLite+Python+TkInter or TCK+Tk as the DDBB UI on top.
Golang can be great too with 1GB of RAM and a simple n270 netbook, I run Yggdrasil on that, and NNCP too among other tools. Everything with nvi as the editor (basically vi+UTF-8+some status line for help), simple Makefiles git://bitreich.org/english_knight and entr(1) as a tool to watch a directory and spawn 'make' on file changes.
Even ESP32 is better than most MS-DOS PCs that were available at the time, and MS-DOS had a rich software environment to chose from.
Now, Klong and MLite can look like toys; but once you grab a piece of paper and a pen and begin jotting down some trivial Math and algo sketches for both languages, even if you are just a self-called "Software Engineer" (in order to be that in Europe you need a Bachelors+Master degree at least, here it would be an Advanced Vocational Trade), your Math skills (and OFC programming ones) will skyrocket.
Also, well, Math and Statistics are great to understand the 100% of papers from STEM. Not just the procedures, but in order to parse the results, Statistics are used to check the validity of some experiment.
Klong https://www.t3x.org/klong/
Intro to Statistics with Klong https://t3x.org/klong-stat/index.html
MLite https://t3x.org/mlite/index.html
And, finally, contrary to LLM's, by using books and solid grounds on both Math and CS you can expect that everything you write it's reproducible. That's it, input always matches the expected output in any case, forever. Not the case for LLM's.
Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
Pi 5 and N150 are completely meaningless since before they came into existence.
Also the price of 3588 increases by batch so you can still get them at almost launch price (4GB was $70 now $110, next batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)
Don't know if that's what GP is talking about though. Too bad they didn't specify a model.
I guess giving up a life of computing and starting a life of vintage tractorring is pretty compelling, but I don't think they're making new batches of 1981 tractors; but who knows what VW is up to these days.
OTOH, DuckDuckGo gave me California tax forms. No thanks!
Back in the old days we didn't have all these AI things and personalization to predict our intent, we had to put context in our queries :)
"(4GB was $70 now $110, next batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)"
If you're quoting specific numbers for a specific product that you're claiming should be in the thread and then you refuse to link it...
It's usable as is.
By the time linux catches up hardware might be very expensive or missing completely.
So my thinking is buy now, use as is, and maybe later we get better software... The point is the 3588 can actually replace my X86 desktop for ALL purposes except Unity/Unreal which I am glad to not run.