Raspberry Pi 2

> it will kill the card from IO cycles. It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure. YMMV and all that.

That's funny. My ten year old Raspberry Pi 2 has none of this crap and won't just magically be different one day because I own it.

I gave up on TVs. Luckily I watch very little TV anyway so it's no big deal. I remember my friend buying a TV for thousands a few years ago and seeing just how laughably bad the interface was compared to Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 2 that I've been running close to 10 years now. Literally it's been on almost that whole time (just had to replace the power supply once). Not only does it play everything on my NAS, I can stream to it and control it from my phone etc. I never update it because it just continues to work. I use a projector instead of a screen because it's better and thankfully they are still dumb. Oh and a huge sound system. And all of that costs less than that one shitty "smart" TV...

Yes, those are the "smart" features. Just plug in a Raspberry Pi and don't touch the TV after its initial setup. I'm still using the same Raspberry Pi 2 I've been using for more than 5 years now. Beats "smart" TVs that you can buy today.

Why so? Even cloud giants are moving in that direction[1]. When next generation Mac Mini with Apple Silicon comes out, data centers using that would be running Apple Server packages on that. In fact I've been running my production applications on ARM servers for ~a year and it has resulted in greater capital efficiency. I've been using Pi 2 with USB storage as a publicly hosted git server for over 5 years used by multiple users. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

I did something similar with a raspberry pi 2 which also by itself is way overkill, it also had a usb-wifi dongle because when I realized that it didn't have wifi natively and running Ethernet was a bit cumbersome for a temporary project. But for these simple projects there is no point in buying the latest and greatest version. When people remember the $35 pricepoint and lament the price increase of today they forget that they don't serve the same purpose anymore. Hell, the Zero 2 is cheaper than that and plenty powerful for a ton of projects.

> I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound , on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.

i use the rpi zero 2 for the IO pins 4b / 5 for the camera stuff. i don’t think using these boards for just compute makes a lot of sense unless it’s for toy stuff like an ssh shell or pihole

Yeah, I started with an obsolete PC a decade ago, and now I’m on a Raspberry Pi 2 and a couple of Orange Pis (zero, 1st gen). Weirdly, it’s enough for me now. I self-host not too many things as of now. So I guess I’d grow at least a couple of Mac minis over time too. However, I’m trying to go slowly there. Funny thing is that despite me admitting that I’m more likely to arrive there too, each time I see a superlab, I wonder ‘what do you guys do with all this?!’

My Raspberry Pis have also gathered quite a lot of dust during the years but they're pretty nice to have around. I needed to start hosting a web service and instead of buying a VPS to run it on, I just dusted off the old Raspberry Pi 2 and set up my service there.

I have a RPi 2 that’s more than enough for my home server needs and I’ve tried to migrate from docker to podman, it simply failed miserably with weird errors, on my laptop everything worked fine, so maybe that’s an issue with Arch ARM or the 32-bit version of it, but really, I wish they could abstract away quadlet, service files generation and so on.

I've bought/set up at least ten of these cheap mini PCs (~$200) over the years and at least half of them had their built-in WiFi just stop working after some time. Something to be aware of if you're not going to be using it wired. Can always swap over to USB WiFi if it stops working anyway. I've never this problem with a Raspberry Pi (have a RPi 2 running on WiFi since it came out!) but haven't bought as many of them.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is the sweet spot these days for price/performance, but it's nowhere to by found in stock, sadly despite the fact it has LPDDR2 type of RAM

I don't understand the unwarranted and ongoing care and enthusiasm for this category of e-waste that was forcibly put upon us. They came out in 2008, were sold until 2010, had literally less performance than a 2000 Pentium III CPU, were lauded from pundits left and right, and probably the school/hand-me-down laptops of that age (like today's e-waste class Chromebooks). Especially when Acer and whatever had proper laptops with proper Intel SU-class CPUs and 3-4 GB RAM for the same price. I disliked these "netbooks" back then and still do, and all that followed its footsteps, including the "laptop"-lookalikes with 32 GB e-MMC storage some mobile carriers would give out with their plans. It's a disrespectful destitute class of computing. I know that the Raspberry Pis came out later, but a Raspberry Pi 2 is a hundred times better engineered and well-rounded product, that will also run a desktop better than these netbooks (or at all). On a related note, I also have colleagues at work who will run only sub-200 dollar smartphones and enjoy living the proper Nigeria/Bangladesh experience from 1-2 years ago . I also know that they don't use heating at home, and do everything in the name of efficiency.

Oof. The Zero 2 and Pi 3 still remain the best value for a Pi in this era. Apparently they both use LPDDR2 RAM, and Raspberry Pi has abundant supply of it.

Ah, that's the thing: "on page load". A one-time expense! If you're using modern page routing, "loading a new URL" isn't actually loading a new page... The client is just simulating it via your router/framework by updating the page URL and adding an entry to the history. Also, 15MB of JS is nothing on modern "low end devices". Even an old, $5 Raspberry Pi 2 won't flinch at that and anything slower than that... isn't my problem! Haha =) There comes a point where supporting 10yo devices isn't worth it when what you're offering/"selling" is the latest & greatest technology. It shouldn't be, "this is why we can't have nice things!" It should be, "this is why YOU can't have nice things!"

And I think they'll continue to sell very well from brand name alone. That won't last forever, but it's not going to disappear next year either. They've had pretty flat unit volume the last 3 years, it's not about to nosedive out of the blue the same as volume is not about to continue growing the same as it used to (even though they launch more and more product lines). The differentiator for the Pi line was support for the capability at the price point, but the competition for the mainline Pis is no longer "random ARM boards with no driver updates", so no longer is that support actually the differentiator for the Pi either. With the lowest cost Pi 5 model, $50 gets you a bare 2GB RAM board with no power or storage and you're still left with the bespoke ARM OS images and binaries to deal with. For the price of higher end models you can just get a complete standard x86 PC which happens to run better. That latter bit about the spec sheet is a bonus, not the main change. I.e. the target market shifted from "hot damn, I can run Linux at such a low price and wattage point while not worrying about support???" to "I want to spend my weekend tinkering with a Pi". The Pico 2 remains decent for the general market though. At $5 it's a well supported MCU with decent kit and a USB interface if you need to have that on a computer. It'll also be interesting to see how much education even remains the mission now that they've IPOd. E.g., the mission statement on the investor relations page is:…