Subj : Re: Raspberry Pi in commercial products
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Mon Dec 11 2023 05:17 am

On 10 Dec 2023 at 12:18a, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni> Over the years, I've become more and more of a believer in what you can
 Ni> do with open-source stuff.  Something I was wondering about recently
 Ni> was, I wonder why Raspberry Pi boards (and similar, I suppose) aren't
 Ni> being adoped & used more for commercial products.

Well, what would that look like?  Would these be things that
end users would run on devices that they own, or would the
Raspberry Pis be used only as a development/testing/deployment
platform for hosted software?

 Ni> For anything requiring a computer, I feel like often, companies decide
 Ni> on a desktop or laptop computer running Windows (which requires buying a
 Ni> license) or perhaps a Mac system, and perhaps developing a software
 Ni> program to run on that computer if needed.  I feel like many times, a
 Ni> Raspberry Pi with a case/enclosure, with Linux on it, would be perfectly
 Ni> suitable and would be much cheaper than buying a standard laptop/desktop
 Ni> with a commercial OS.  I know this wouldn't be true for all cases, but
 Ni> for many cases, I think it could save significant money.  And if
 Ni> software is needed, there are good software development tools for
 Ni> creating software for Linux.

If we're talking about a corporate computing environment, then
this is leaving out support considerations.  A Raspberry Pi is
a neat device for a hobbyist, or even for light use in a home
environment, but they're fiddly: SD cards are not a durable
storage solution for general compute, they're slow, and there
are issues around application availability and vendor support.
For a lot of organizations, the expensive bit isn't the device
itself, but supporting that device over its service lifetime:
TCO may be cheaper with a laptop or desktop running Windows or
whatever, simply due to lower support costs.

There are also issues of volume.  RPis were pretty unavailable
due to pandemic-related supply-chain issues over the last few
years.

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