Every second day I see a post on some blog or news site of a Raspberry Pi competitor that is more powerful, cheaper or better available (snicker). Just today it was the Gooseberry, the Mele A1000 and the CX-01.

Well, most of the time these claims are true, more or less. Until you realize that the cheaper price get’s eaten up by shipping, customs etc. Until you realize that it is just some kind of hacked hardware from some device. For example, I have a Seagate DockStar, which was a 25€ device that can be hacked to run normal Debian. Same thing with the Mele A1000, which has interesting specs (Allwinner A10 and Mali 400) but you need to buy a device that is meant for some other task and might be discontinued any time. The Gooseboard is basically a stripped tablet, meant for running Android, nothing else. The CX01 is also meant as an Android davice, not a general-purpose computer. With it, you get all kinds of typical Android updating pains.

Now let me tell you why I think the RPi is exciting: is is an actual computer! Many people compare it with the BBC Micro, of which I don’t know much but for me it has the appeal of a platform like C64. A device to empower users, unlike the locked-down consumer stuff from HTC, Sony, Apple, you name it. What the RPi offers is a device that you can buy in 2012 (well, to some extent), in 2013 and 2017 just as well and it still serves it’s purpose. I compare it to my Nexus One, a beautiful top-of-the line 2010 device that begins to show it’s age now that it hardly gets updates, the storage is too small and it cannot be used as a general-purpose computer.

Of course the RPi has it’s fair share of problems. The curious retro composite ports, the outdated and slow CPU, the proprietary-to-the-max GPU. I already hate all this, but what the foundation has achieved is quite interesting: a big, excited community of users and hackers, a low price point, a decent and useful device especially due to the USB port which extend the possibilities of such a device vastly. I can be reasonably sure that the RPi will stay around, so it is worth tinkering with it and other people can reproduce it. Hell, at this price point I might consider getting lots of them and using them as computation units in every room in my house, something that Beagleboard/bone, Pandaboard etc. haven’t been able to achieve.

What I hope for, is a modding community to form like in the case with Arduino, with different compatible boards. Anyway, I for now welcome our new Raspberry Pi overlords.