I have a lot of trouble trusting pre-built mini computers from random manufacturers. Way too easy to slap some malware on a chip on the board somewhere. Maybe I just have trust issues but I don't really want to give anything I buy on Aliexpress network access.
I wish these form factors were more popular with more reputable brands.
Well, if you're willing to pay a bit more, you have Asus, Lenovo and HP all with mini/micro form factor options. I've had decent experience with Minis Forum, BeeLink and GMKTek... though I will buy through Amazon... the returns will usually work better than going through some misc Ali Express seller.
There have been many cases of spy chips installed on reputable brands. A famous case was Elemental (transcoding company, purchased by AWS) , where AWS discovered espionage chips installed while they were integrating Elemental's Supermicro-based units into AWS datacenter
That Supermicro story was never confirmed/verified. All the companies involved denied that it happened (that doesn't mean much however) but no other reporters were able verify the story as far as I'm aware. With Bloomberg saying they had something like 12 anonymous sources, the likelihood that the NYT, Washington Post, Wired, etc. etc. etc. were not able to reach any of the same sources or corroboration says something.
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.
I remember in one of the reports seeing a scan of the board with the inconsistent chip. The premise is plausible. It's not rocket science, so the bar for believing it is pretty low.
12 anonymous testimonies and a story is not zero evidence. Most of the history you are taught in school has a similar bar.
And used intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They're pretty handy and upgradable actually.
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.
Pis are awesome if you have PoE+ or better. I have two pis one of them using the nvme+poe+ hat connected with just an ethernet cable. It also has serial UART port that counts as an offline remote access of sorts.
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.
Mkay but what is the advantage of Mac Mini over HP Elitedesk? If it's for running servers like CasaOS etc., you will have to deal with one problem after another. It's my biggest gripe with Apple's hardware: it's deliberately obsoleted after a few years (as opposed to what MS is doing - they only started playing this game with Windows 11) and at this point you are more or less limited to what was available at that time. (You can get around this with Dosdude etc. for some time but you hit the wall at some point.)
Beelink has served me very well the last decade. I used to use those old Shuttle XPC's and things but Beelink has proved you can fit a lot of power in a puck. You can also take it apart, add memory, add m2 drive, whatever.
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.
It troubles me to see so many sketchy brands recommended by tech reviewers like LTT or ServeTheHome. It's going to be great when they all go rogue in the event of conflict.
What's your definition of sketchy? For me I'd say by definition a non-sketchy brand is one that has some kind of social proof. The next question though is who do you trust?
Learn to live with 1GB of RAM. Either CLI/TUI tools, or software like Dillo or Sxiv. Mainline dillo from their Git and not the outdated one from the repos. The new "dilloc" it's amazing, you need Dillo compiled with socket control support.
Then you will be able to use dilloc as a client to spawn commands con scripts. For instance, to rewrite URL's from a list. Hint: the ones from https://farside.link . Youtube to Invidious, X.com to Nitter and so on.
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.
Some languages from T3X target even DOS as CP/M, such as T3X0 itself. OFC with lesser capabilities and being slower on older 16 bit machines, but it's an interesting exercise. And, as I said, s9fes it's very capable, it has Unix syscall and Curses support:
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.
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.
Indirectly related but it's a little surprising that we haven't heard about price adjustments from Valve for the Steam Deck yet to account for the DRAM price increases.
Higher DRAM prices are bound to also affect their unreleased devices and make them a tougher sell to buyers.
The Steam Deck is an established product that was first released in February 2022. You may be thinking of the Steam Machine, which indeed does not have public pricing that I'm aware of.
I don't think they'll be able to sell at a loss, because they are effectively selling desktop computers, not dedicated game consoles. It would be easy for a company to flash Windows onto them and deploy them in an office space, for example.
Well hopefully this will help to keep the "x86 guy" from barging into EVERY arm sbc related conversation regardless of the subject. They will ignore every argument about what the conversation is about and point out their recycled trash Lenovo uses 6W on idle while conflating idle power usage with efficiency per watt.
"Yeah dude we know but I need a Pi for this project. So sit down."
Price parity but not feature parity. I still struggle to find good use-cases for the full sized Pi that both require direct GPIO and the increased CPU capabilities/storage speeds. For anything that needs GPIO, I find it much easier to just run it on a Zero 2W.
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.
100% agree on the better video hardware. I found out this weekend the Raspberry Pi 5 removes the dedicated video encoder present on the Pi 4B. I was getting 2-3 fps in OBS, which makes it unusable for my application. Any mini PC would do much better with dedicated encode capabilities.
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...
I believe the Pi 5 dropped the hardware encoder for H.264 only, with the claim that the CPU was fast enough to brute force it (sure...). It does have accelerated HEVC, so OBS should be able to handle that.
excellent points. I'd also add that at slightly higher price you can include embedded TPUs /NPU like RyzenAI . With all of the lacking features you mentioned, and the AI features in mini PCs, Raspberry PI seems to be many years behind.
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.
I would still go with the Raspberry Pi, because it is designed from the ground up for Linux, while most mini PC home labs are the usual hit-and-miss with Linux distros.
AI is an impressive technology, but because its turned into a Space Race we're getting into some wild territory. Sam Altman who has been notorious for being quite the con artist is at the helm of this. I heard a friend suggest that the real AI bubble starts with Sam Altman, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unaware, Sam Altman has quite a crazy history, including selling a company with questionable MAU's for millions of dollars, which was then shut down because the actual MAU's was much lower than suggested. He also claimed to be chairman of YC with the SEC for years, despite never being chairman of YC. I wouldn't trust Sam Altman alone with my wife or kids, why should I trust him with AI?
Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
To write this article without mentioning the 3588, is like writing about Venezuela without mentioning oil.
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)
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!
It's still flakey, but with the open panthor driver things are working well.
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.
I have a lot of trouble trusting pre-built mini computers from random manufacturers. Way too easy to slap some malware on a chip on the board somewhere. Maybe I just have trust issues but I don't really want to give anything I buy on Aliexpress network access.
I wish these form factors were more popular with more reputable brands.
Well, if you're willing to pay a bit more, you have Asus, Lenovo and HP all with mini/micro form factor options. I've had decent experience with Minis Forum, BeeLink and GMKTek... though I will buy through Amazon... the returns will usually work better than going through some misc Ali Express seller.
There have been many cases of spy chips installed on reputable brands. A famous case was Elemental (transcoding company, purchased by AWS) , where AWS discovered espionage chips installed while they were integrating Elemental's Supermicro-based units into AWS datacenter
(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.
That Supermicro story was never confirmed/verified. All the companies involved denied that it happened (that doesn't mean much however) but no other reporters were able verify the story as far as I'm aware. With Bloomberg saying they had something like 12 anonymous sources, the likelihood that the NYT, Washington Post, Wired, etc. etc. etc. were not able to reach any of the same sources or corroboration says something.
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.)
I remember in one of the reports seeing a scan of the board with the inconsistent chip. The premise is plausible. It's not rocket science, so the bar for believing it is pretty low.
12 anonymous testimonies and a story is not zero evidence. Most of the history you are taught in school has a similar bar.
"Most of the history you are taught in school has a similar bar."
No, it does not.
The Mac mini exists. Suffering is a choice.
And used intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They're pretty handy and upgradable actually.
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.
Pis are awesome if you have PoE+ or better. I have two pis one of them using the nvme+poe+ hat connected with just an ethernet cable. It also has serial UART port that counts as an offline remote access of sorts.
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.
Mkay but what is the advantage of Mac Mini over HP Elitedesk? If it's for running servers like CasaOS etc., you will have to deal with one problem after another. It's my biggest gripe with Apple's hardware: it's deliberately obsoleted after a few years (as opposed to what MS is doing - they only started playing this game with Windows 11) and at this point you are more or less limited to what was available at that time. (You can get around this with Dosdude etc. for some time but you hit the wall at some point.)
I've been Linux-only for over a decade, I've long since made that choice :)
Also, the cheapest Mac Mini is $600. The Mini PCs we're discussing are generally sub-$200.
I rather not having my wallet suffer, starting at 700 € in Germany.
Beelink has served me very well the last decade. I used to use those old Shuttle XPC's and things but Beelink has proved you can fit a lot of power in a puck. You can also take it apart, add memory, add m2 drive, whatever.
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.
Some of the recent Beelink ones have soldered ram though.
Some of them have 128GB of unified memory…
It troubles me to see so many sketchy brands recommended by tech reviewers like LTT or ServeTheHome. It's going to be great when they all go rogue in the event of conflict.
What's your definition of sketchy? For me I'd say by definition a non-sketchy brand is one that has some kind of social proof. The next question though is who do you trust?
Learn to live with 1GB of RAM. Either CLI/TUI tools, or software like Dillo or Sxiv. Mainline dillo from their Git and not the outdated one from the repos. The new "dilloc" it's amazing, you need Dillo compiled with socket control support. Then you will be able to use dilloc as a client to spawn commands con scripts. For instance, to rewrite URL's from a list. Hint: the ones from https://farside.link . Youtube to Invidious, X.com to Nitter and so on.
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.
Yeah, as someone that started with 48 KB, I think most people lost track of what is possible.
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.
Some languages from T3X target even DOS as CP/M, such as T3X0 itself. OFC with lesser capabilities and being slower on older 16 bit machines, but it's an interesting exercise. And, as I said, s9fes it's very capable, it has Unix syscall and Curses support:
https://www.t3x.org/s9fes/
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.
Spot on, and I fully agree with the Engineering remark.
If you have an Apple ][ retro emulator, what book would you recommend to explore programming the full stack way (as in, assembly language up to lisp)?
IDK much about 6502 assembly on Apple II (I barely did a Hello World under the Kim-Uno emulator), but these people can help:
https://www.6502.org/tutorials/
Shoutout to another fellow Yggdrasil user! There are dozens of us!
Indirectly related but it's a little surprising that we haven't heard about price adjustments from Valve for the Steam Deck yet to account for the DRAM price increases.
Higher DRAM prices are bound to also affect their unreleased devices and make them a tougher sell to buyers.
Have they announced any price from which to adjust? If not, then it would be unnecessary for them to announce the adjustment.
The Steam Deck is an established product that was first released in February 2022. You may be thinking of the Steam Machine, which indeed does not have public pricing that I'm aware of.
I assume they're going to sell them at a bit of a loss, but I do wonder too if the RAM cost will force them out of the project for the time being.
I don't think they'll be able to sell at a loss, because they are effectively selling desktop computers, not dedicated game consoles. It would be easy for a company to flash Windows onto them and deploy them in an office space, for example.
They've already ended production for their basic 256GB LCD model; the 512GB OLED is now their new baseline.
That's the steam deck, the handheld, not the minipc like cube they announced
This discussion is about the Steam Deck.
Top level comment was about both ('also affect their unreleased devices'), this sub-thread about the latter ('going to').
Perhaps they have already secured components for the foreseeable future.
Well hopefully this will help to keep the "x86 guy" from barging into EVERY arm sbc related conversation regardless of the subject. They will ignore every argument about what the conversation is about and point out their recycled trash Lenovo uses 6W on idle while conflating idle power usage with efficiency per watt.
"Yeah dude we know but I need a Pi for this project. So sit down."
You know you can get little USB GPIO boards that emulate most of the Pi's pins for you right?
/s
Price parity but not feature parity. I still struggle to find good use-cases for the full sized Pi that both require direct GPIO and the increased CPU capabilities/storage speeds. For anything that needs GPIO, I find it much easier to just run it on a Zero 2W.
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.
100% agree on the better video hardware. I found out this weekend the Raspberry Pi 5 removes the dedicated video encoder present on the Pi 4B. I was getting 2-3 fps in OBS, which makes it unusable for my application. Any mini PC would do much better with dedicated encode capabilities.
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...
I believe the Pi 5 dropped the hardware encoder for H.264 only, with the claim that the CPU was fast enough to brute force it (sure...). It does have accelerated HEVC, so OBS should be able to handle that.
excellent points. I'd also add that at slightly higher price you can include embedded TPUs /NPU like RyzenAI . With all of the lacking features you mentioned, and the AI features in mini PCs, Raspberry PI seems to be many years behind.
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.
I would still go with the Raspberry Pi, because it is designed from the ground up for Linux, while most mini PC home labs are the usual hit-and-miss with Linux distros.
AI is an impressive technology, but because its turned into a Space Race we're getting into some wild territory. Sam Altman who has been notorious for being quite the con artist is at the helm of this. I heard a friend suggest that the real AI bubble starts with Sam Altman, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unaware, Sam Altman has quite a crazy history, including selling a company with questionable MAU's for millions of dollars, which was then shut down because the actual MAU's was much lower than suggested. He also claimed to be chairman of YC with the SEC for years, despite never being chairman of YC. I wouldn't trust Sam Altman alone with my wife or kids, why should I trust him with AI?
Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
Do you need anything else than scanning people eyeballs for supposedly UBI cryptocurrency?
Sam Altman is the world's second most successful liar, behind Elon Musk. Elon only dislikes him because he was on the other end for once.
Sam is also behind Worldcoin.
He's a complete grifter.
... for the worst possible imaginable reason, a massive price rise for both Raspberry Pi and mini pcs.
To write this article without mentioning the 3588, is like writing about Venezuela without mentioning oil.
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)
Could you please provide a link? I don't know what 3588 is. It seems to be, Rockchip RK3588?
The Orange Pi 5 (RK3588 processor) with 4GB RAM is $103 on Amazon.
Don't know if that's what GP is talking about though. Too bad they didn't specify a model.
Yes, you have to google it yourself, there are too many with pros and cons beyond a hn comment.
Google gives me this for 3588 https://www.tractordata.com/farm-tractors/000/3/8/381-intern...
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!
If you search "pi n150 3588" (without the quotes), Kagi, Google and DuckDuckGo all make it clear that "3588" means "RK3588" or "Rockchip RK3588".
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 :)
Yes, but they seem to be talking about a specific product?
I think it's reasonable to ask, what's $70, now $110 and $150?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...
rockchip may have lots of raw power but software compatibility vs a N150 is very low
Are rockchip finally providing upstream support?
It's still flakey, but with the open panthor driver things are working well.
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.