this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Their original goal was to provide an affordable and customizable computing device with generic IO ports for a classroom, which they very much did.
14 years later, classrooms have a crapload of alternatives, ranging from $3 ESP32, which you can literally solder and throw away, to $500 Jetson, and all Raspberry Pi clones, like NanoPi or OrangePi, all with GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C ports, for all your microcontroller needs.
As for the embedded developers community (or 'makers' as kids call themselves nowadays) - these are the kind of people who dump two thousand bucks for a 3D printer and then use it twice a year. I think they will survive raising Raspberry Pi 5 price to $45.
And Raspberry Pi foundation pivoting towards business is a predictable move - those kids who used Raspberry Pi 14 years ago in a classroom are now business owners or technical leads in many businesses.
I think it's strange that they haven't extended the 40 pin IO capabilities. For instance analogue IO would be very welcome for many purposes.
There's always the BeagleBone Black if you need a lot of IO. It has a 12 bit ADC too.
But, but, eighty bucks! TI boards are seriously overpriced.
It's USD $53 on DigiKey and Mouser. That's still rather expensive for an old single board computer, but it has a lot more IO than most other computers as well as a pair of real time co-processors for handling high speed IO.