I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.
$136 on Amazon ($99 from AliExpress). Color me very impressed. Given the modern web, probably too under-powered to be a great experience for a daily driver, but probably not terrible if you are not a tab addict like myself.
My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing. A year from now, will it be able to install a new kernel?
I also have to face reality in that I have zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty. I think almost everyone would be better served by a NUC ($400+) or refurbished SFF PC ($100-200 can be very competitive hardware).
> My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing.
ARM shouldn't be a problem for a long time; there's a huge number of boards out there using that architecture and most of them are well supported by Linux.
Here are some Armbian images: https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/opi800/
The user is reliable and a regular Armbian contributor/maintainer.
> zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty
I think the main selling point of these devices is for kids to carry them in their backpack when they study with their friends, so that they have all their stuff in a single device that is more usable and safe than a cellphone and needs only a video connection, without messing with the family computer.
A relatively low cost independent device with exposed gpio ports could also have some uses in a lab to drive external hardware, microcontrollers programming, etc. If I had one I would probably use it for such tasks, including audio measurement by adding an external sound card.
As for "why not" the alternatives, it's because they get no ongoing support, and don't run mainline Linux, so you're stuck with what they ship with, and can never update them.
All the raspberry pi alternatives have some really Achilles heel software problems where they don't properly support everything the raspberry pi does. I will never buy one just because I want to run software on these computers and 90% of the time the thing I want to just doesn't support these things natively.
How can you know about them if you'll never buy one, and I presume you don't have any?
I have all RPis minus the CMs, the Zeros and the 400, then I also have a bunch of Orange Pis and NanoPis, one old Hackberry A10, one Odroid C2 and a couple Beaglebones I just bought used and still have to find the use for (possibly network services because of eMMC better reliability compared to sdcard). I loved playing with all of them, including the RPis.
I however stopped buying Raspberries (except maybe the Pico which I find a lot more interesting than the bigger ones) because of both their insane pricing and that "alternative"[0] boards can do whatever I need, and if something doesn't work, which happens rarely, I'm pretty sure it can be sorted out by searching and trial+error.
[0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2].
One problem with this for kids is if it is connected to the monitor with a cable, kids used to wireless keyboard may try to grab it and get a surprise when it gets disconnected or pulls the monitor down with the keyboard.
Is it more powerful? Well, more memory, better video, but in terms of OP/s?
But I don't think it's such a great thing for kids per se. It depends on the experimentation environment they get. The hardware is almost irrelevant. Something as direct as a Commodore 64 looks more appealing to me than VSCode on a Raspberry.
Unless they’re following a particular course based on a specific thing like a Pi they’ll probably be better off with some older repurposed hardware, an old desktop PC with some sort of Linux perhaps.
The Pi shines when you’re interfacing with relays and sensors and stuff, for software alone a PC or laptop will be fine.
Are the raspberry pi still produced? They are always out of stock unless for very brief periods on some random stores, which makes me believe some may purchase some old stock once in a while but nothing is getting out of a factory.
The original pis were made to sell some chips that Broadcom had a ton of excess inventory for, and needed to move (hence why the price was so low compared to other SBCs at the time - the main SoCs were free). The modern version is now competing for a chip that's in demand, and can't offer the same price that other people can. They are still being produced since Broadcom doesn't want to cut them off completely, but not nearly as available.
Do you have source for the claims? I doubt especially of free parts. As of rumors I have heard about Broadcom it is extremely "capitalistic" company. If you move a lot of chips price can go down a lot (due the fact that NRE divides to more units). The cost of chip manufacturing alone is not that big - example Apple A14 bionic chip was estimated to cost 17$ to manufacture [0] and it should be waaaaay more expensive than anything in RPI.
I think that is something YouTube rolled out a year or two ago to isolate adult YouTube from kids. You know sometimes a video gets marked with a YT kids banner and comments are disabled and recommendations on the side bar replaced with generic videos.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
By the way, people say it's a great learning tool for kids but when I search for "kid using pi400" on youtube there are zero results.