Orange Pi

Things were getting a little more expensive in November of last year.

But just people I had met and talked with that worked for and with these companies, um, in China, in Shenzhen, in these places, working with Rosden, Banana Pi, and Orange Pi, and, and they were like, "Dude, we're, we're having trouble getting memory and stuff like that." And I, I said on Linux GameCast, I'm like, "Single board computers gonna be dead in 2026." This was not a difficult prediction to make, by the way, with the information [laughs] I was given, and we've even seen.

Yeah.

We got $360 Raspberry Pi 4s, you know, which it might as well not exist to a person like me and you.

Everybody's hit by this.

You know, be it Rasda, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, um, any, uh, mini PC manufacturers, especially small companies.

The one thing advantage Raspberry Pi has is money in the bank.

You know, a lot of these smaller companies that have been making boards for a decade now, they run on, like, really thin margins, and they've been hit, uh, especially in North America with, like, the de minimis, they got rid of that for imports, now they got extra tariffs on top of that.

I'm not sure about the 5.

Last I knew, only the Orange Pis were the ones that could actually do the display.

Hmm.

Um, but that was p- that was before the 5s actually came out.

Well, now with AI and AI inferencing and other things like that around that, that's now commoditized.

You can use regular old cameras that you can pick up from Amazon or whatever you like, You can go get an NVIDIA Jetson for relatively inexpensive or Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi, whatever else.

You can put a relatively lightweight AI model on top of it and you can start to do really interesting things.

So you can now, all of these crazy ideas that you've had that historically might have been oh my god these are awesome but there's no way this will be a multi-million dollar multi-year project to do this now is probably going to be a few thousand dollars in infrastructure and some time probably probably vibe coding you know we can because we can do that now You can really ideate and get something usable in a POC pretty damn quickly.