That began in 2020 for them.

They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.

Announcing: Raspberry pi recall

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that you are always either right, or pleasantly surprised.

I look for broken but working sff/tiny deals. Scored a sweet i5 7500 /16gb system for $100CAD. Just had a broken audio port I was never going to use.

Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.

Mostly that IPOs put companies into 'infinite growth mode' which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can't just do 'good enough' anymore.

Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.

Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.

Think they'll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they're reporting to shareholders?

Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.

It doesn't always end this way but often enough to worry about it...

Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.

First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we've basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.

In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don't care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.

https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs

There are so many!

There's tons of similar SBC's out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They're all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards... but it's still not quite as good.

I got a 'LePotato' a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.