The Future of Consumer SBCs: Has the Pi bubble burst?

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time I'm going to talk about the future of consumer single board computers back in 2012 the first Raspberry Pi was launched and whilst it was not the first SBC it's 35 price tag did dramatically change the market for low-cost small form factor consumer Hardware since that time A lot has changed with the average price of an rmsbc having risen whilst the price of some small form factor xx6 computers Has Fallen in addition Linux SBC distros have generally got heavier 32-bit the look support has diminished and user expectations for SBC hardware and software have increased add in supply chain pressures and competition for more powerful microcontrollers and it's pretty certain that the market for Consumer sbcs will not return to how it was a few years ago so if you're a maker or a low-cost SBC Enthusiast like I am what do all of these things imply for the future of consumer single board computers as far as I can tell aside from industrial buyers there are three key categories of people who purchase single board computers firstly we have makers those who want to use an SBC in a project for example in a robot or for home automation secondly there are those who want a low-cost small computer either to use as a small desktop or for Retro Gaming as a Nas to be a print server applications like that and finally there are Die Hard SBC enthusiasts who often purchase the latest Hardware with no particular use in mind and to understand how the SBC Market is evolving we need to think about the most cost effective options for all of these different types of consumer as I said in the introduction in the past few years prices have significantly changed five years ago most sbcs with an armed processor cost between five dollars for a Raspberry Pi zero up to about one hundred dollars with an average price of say fifty to sixty dollars meanwhile whilst you could get some x86 sbcs for under 100 most were priced in the 200 to 300 bracket and outside of the SBC Marketplace it was very hard to buy a mini PC with an x86 processor for less than a few hundred dollars and when this was the state of the market most makers and enthusiasts purchased arm sbcs unless they had a specific need for more powerful x86 model and critically sbcs with an armed processor were also a natural choice for those wanting a low-cost computer fast forward to today and whilst the price of x86 sbcs has not really changed on average arm boards do cost considerably more well okay in Syria you can buy a Raspberry Pi zero for ten dollars and a two gigabyte Raspberry Pi four for forty five dollars but in practice and for reasons I'll discuss in a minute many rmsbc's are now priced in the 75 to 200 bracket with some rk3588 boards now costing considerably more meanwhile mini x86 PCS can now be purchased from about 100 dollars and given that many companies have been using small form factor hardware for several years there are now also a lot of renewed small form factor business PCS available also priced from around 100 dollars many of those who want a low-cost small computer are therefore now buying many PCs or renewed business Hardware and even some makers and SBC enthusiasts are now casting their purchasing net more widely basically many people are now realizing that for example for the price of a four gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4 with a Micro SD card and a power supply and a nice case like this for the price of these items you can alternatively purchase a Mini PC something like this which costs 100 dollars or you could purchase a piece of renewed business Hardware like this which again costs from about one hundred dollars now admittedly the SBC option the rmsbc option still has certain advantages it uses less energy it's got better connectivity but there is no doubt the market is changing so let's delve a bit more deeply into why this is the case now one of the things that has forced up the specification and hence price of rmsbcs is that the Linux distros and applications they generally run are getting heavier more bloated software is sadly a common curse in Computing and means that more CPU power and more memory are now needed to run things as well as we once did to demonstrate the point here I've got an original 512 megabyte Ram Raspberry Pi 1B and this is running an early version of what was called raspbian but it's still pretty fluid if we go down to the menu you'll see it's uh pretty responsive and let's go for example oh lots of things under those are masses of things on the other anyway let's run up for example the LibreOffice writer like that it'll take a little bit of time it's not going to be instant on this 700 megahertz single core system but it is going to be usable it's going to come up in a reasonable period of time give it a second come on you can do it there we are we've got it working word processor and let's also try and run up a browser I think it's called a net surf the browser down here it'll take a second to respond but it will get there I'm sure it'll get there in the end come on browser you can do it there it is and we've got a browser working on the system we can go across to a different page something like that it'll still work okay there we are takes a second to load in the images but it does work although if we try to go to somewhere complicated like YouTube well this will take time and then fail as websites as well as operating systems and applications have got a lot more bloated over the past decade but even so the many things this Raspberry Pi 1B with its original distro offer a slow but usable desktop Computing experience so let's see what happens if we close this down like that and then I'm going to turn off the power and I'll now take out this SD card we didn't have a micro SD card original Pi it was an SD card I'm going to plug in another card and this contains a fresh install of the February 2023 version of Raspberry Pi OS Legacy which is the operating system now provided by Raspberry Pi for this board and if we call on the magic of filmmaking we can see how the boot time for the current OS compares to the original so let's turn on the power and of course we'll speed on through and there we are the original operating system has one so let's now speed on through to let the current operating system also finish and what a different result clearly proof that the older operating system boots much more quickly than the new one and although my point is really now made Let's also try and run up some software the new operating system is still pretty fluid there's no problems with the fluidity on this system but let's Now launch for example Bieber office writer again we don't expect it to be fast it wasn't fast on the old one it's not going to be fast on the new one but let's just see how much more slow it is it's going to take quite a long time and you might be thinking this is an irrelevant test because things have moved on but do remember that a Raspberry Pi zero and zero w102w still have five 12 megabytes of ram just like this original Raspberry Pi 1B so this kind of desktop performance is the sort of thing you'll get in the Raspberry Pi zero today and as you can see it's taking a very long time to get into LibreOffice clearly a lot more time than we took with 10 year old software and we will try to launch a web browser let's just try that we'll launch it from up there although I'll let you know straight away it isn't going to work you can't launch the web browser on this system I imagine it's because there simply isn't enough memory on the board and so what we're demonstrating here what we've clearly shown is that due to bloated software it's getting harder and harder to create a very low cost SBC that offers usable desktop performance something else to be aware of is the decline of 32-bit operating systems with many Linux distros now only supporting a 64-bit version given that 64-bit operating systems generally require four gigabytes of RAM to function well this is also very significant for low-cost sbcs some of which still have one or two gigabytes of memory or in the case of the Raspberry Pi zero models half a gigabyte of memory now right now Debian does still support the 32-bit version and this is significant because Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian so we still have a 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS it's still really the dominant version but looking into the future there is no guarantee that 32-bit Linux support is going to continue and so it is likely that in the future most sbcs will require at least four gigabytes of memory and this will inevitably push up the average price of a single board computer many SBC manufacturers advertise that you can use their boards as small desktop PCS and there is no doubt that some people do just that however the expectations that people have of a desktop PC are changing it used to be you expected a desktop PC to be able to be used for word processing spreadsheet a bit of email accessing the web maybe with a photo editing and playing all your things like that and that still is the case today but also today people expect you can use a desktop PC to stream high definition video in a browser and that's something that sadly a lot of rmsbcs struggle with because they often don't have the drivers to enable them to do it the hardware is capable of it but the GPU drivers often aren't available and this is one of the reasons I think many people are now starting to go towards boards like this rather than sbcs because if you buy a mini PC running Windows it will be able to stream streaming media perfectly happy in the browser in a way that many sbcs can't the other issue in terms of user expectations moving from software to Hardware is that we should remember that when the Raspberry Pi came out one of the real reasons for launching it was to get more people coding to get more people experimenting with a computer and it was very very successful with that so the Raspberry Pi was launched with the minimum specification required to actually give you a fully functional computer that you could afford to experiment on and if you messed it up you hadn't messed up a desktop PC or a laptop something far more expensive and I think we need to keep this in mind when we think about expectations for future sbcs I often find people saying in the comments on this channel you know what will we see in the Raspberry Pi 5 and they say things like well of course it'll need emmc flash storage you know how to have lots and lots of memory and an m.2 slot for a drive and even some people say it should have socketed Ram which means it wouldn't even still be a single bore computer but even ignoring the semantics many of the things people want to be added to Singapore computers would make them incredibly expensive and that kind of defeats the point of certainly a board like the Raspberry Pi in the first place and so I hope that when we do see a Raspberry Pi 5 hopefully in 2024 that they will maintain the price point I'm sure they will maintain the price point and that will inevitably constrain the kind of Hardware specification that can be provided foreign over the past few years supply chain disruption has limited the availability of the Raspberry Pi and other single board computers when it comes to the Raspberry Pi the situation should be fully resolved by the second half of 2023 that's what Evan Upton told us in an interview with this channel back in December 2022 so we'll cross our fingers at the Raspberry Pi availability issue we'll get back to normal fairly soon however I still think there are things we can reflect on which has resulted from the supply chain issues we've seen not least it's become increasingly obvious that some single ball computers have never been economically viable to manufacture thinking particularly about for example the Raspberry Pi zero as Evan told us in that interview they've always been searching around the odd bits of manufacturing capacity as they become available to get the board manufactured and that's not a good situation and now at least the price of the Raspberry Pi zero has been increased from five dollars to ten dollars I'd much rather the cheaper board or even more expensive than that if they need to be if it means they can become available it doesn't help anybody if a board is so uneconomic to Manufactured it can't be kept in a reasonable level of supply the other thing I think which has stemmed from the supply chain issues we've seen for the pile of the sbcs is that some makers have started to use microcontrollers when they haven't used microcontrollers ever before or they haven't used them in certain types of projects before not least people have been using the raspberry pi Pico in projects where they might have used for example a Raspberry Pi zero and you might have seen on this channel I did for example this project earlier this year with a Raspberry Pi Pico where it's equipped here with a VGA output and a keyboard input and a Micro SD card slot and this is running the mm basic programming language created by Jeff Graham this is a boot to basic computer created with a microcontroller but it could be used for all sorts of Robotics and other applications and I suspect that going ahead the fact that makers have had to live without a good supply of sbcs for a few years means they've changed a little bit what they do in the future they're going to be more likely to use microcontrollers and less likely in some circumstances to use a single board computer foreign so what does everything I've talked about mean for the future well I would offer five predictions firstly I think there'll be an increasing diversity of low-cost consumer small form factor computers with makers and Computing enthusiasts using not just sbcs but also low-cost mini PCS and renewed Hardware indeed for many messages and conversations I've had over the past six months or so it's pretty clear this is already starting to happen secondly I expect that sbcs in general will become more industrially focused just as they were long before the Raspberry Pi existed this said I also expect there will be a strong market for Consumer sbcs costing up to about 75 however I also Imagine That sbc's costing 100 or more will increasingly struggle in the consumer Market unless they offer key maker features such as gpus or npus for machine learning so for example I expect nvidia's Jetson range to continue to do well outside of Industry and finally I also think we're going to see a greater use of microcontrollers in the Makers Space which is again a trend we can already Witness but what do you think please let us all know down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed but you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 246,637

Keywords: SBC, future SBC, future of Raspberry Pi, future of SBCs, mini PCs, small form factor, ARM SBC, x86 SBC, SBC market, SBC marketplace, SBCs and microcontrollers, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Pi bubble, SBC prices

Id: Hjb3bx6vxnc

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023