> I know there’s something about the Raspberry Pi that makes armchair quarterbacks want to find ways to call their engineers “hacks” and “NOOBS”
Because they are hacks and noobs? Who puts a WLCSP part on a board which is more commonly zip-tied to a piece of wood than it is placed into a case, and is more likely to be driving some wild contraption shooting RF and UV and god knows what else everywhere, than it is sitting inside some nice little commercial device like an office labelmaker?
Their hardware is almost always immediately superceded by cheaper, faster, better boards because they're not trying to give Qualcomm blowjobs clearing out shitty SoCs nobody wanted to buy because they were buggy, underperformant, overpriced, or all three...and they don't have the market advantage of everyone buying whatever garbage they spit out. Other companies have to start on the back of their heels so their products can't suck.
Their hardware designers are inept with every generation of every product they've made having issues and/or promised features not making it into production.
Their QA is non-existent despite seeding test boards widely where either they're not catching problems before doing into production or they're intentionally not fixing stuff because it would increase their costs and they know people will just snap up whatever garbage the Pi Foundation ships. The problems are so bad that you have to ask how they even got past internal testing and validation.
Seriously: if a bunch of college EE students worked for a semester they could probably build a better product.
Each generation of the Raspberry Pi has had basic hardware design flaws showing that their hardware engineering was not up to the task of producing the dominant hobbyist (and increasingly commercial/industrial, somewhat frighteningly) SBC.
Then they fucked up the RP2040, a wildly simpler product. When when they released a revised version that fixed the ADC issue, they fucked up GPIO. How do you fuck up GPIO and not notice?
I don't know who the Raspberry Pi foundation employes as hardware enginers but whoever their head of engineering is should have been fired a long, long time ago.
Unfortunately, people that understand the responsibility aspect of engineering are few and far between. Hack together whatever you want, and Have fun doing it… but if your actions are going to create millions or billions of objects that millions or billions of people are going to somehow interact with or be exposed to the effect of on a daily basis, you have a deep and fundamental responsibility to make sure that those interactions are at the very least completely and utterly benign. This applies to software as well as hardware.
Introducing even a tiny spark of misery into the world that will be experienced millions or billions of times makes you a world class asshole that has actively contributed to making the world a shittier place in a significant way. It’s like you just dumped a c130 load of gum wrappers over a city from high altitude.
So what should I buy instead of the RPi Zero 2 W, that's faster, cheaper, and better?
Ah, there it is. As a long-time Pi lore aficionado (is there such a thing? or am I just obsessed with a company that the CEO amusingly describes as "the other fruit computer company"?) in any thread that gets traction there's inevitably a screed posted along these lines:
* "I'm mad because there's not an open source hardware/software/gpu/schematics/BOM" so I can't hypothetically make a clone of it
* If (1) above is not the motivation, then it's because there's some specific use-case that doesn't work that the rage-post precipitates, and crucially - includes zero links to bug reports or a log of efforts that the OP has attempted
* "All the designers are idiots because minor fault X is indicative of systemic failure Y" - with no supporting evidence
* General assertions that all these faults are catastrophic and should bankrupt the company (often conflated with the Foundation, which is a completely separate legal entity)
There's been about 80 million units sold so far. They must be doing something right.
Disclaimer: I own RPI.L stock. It's one of the few tech stocks on the LSE that have actually performed OK and not tanked since IPO.
When you make something that will be mass produced 80 million times, you have a fundamental duty as an engineer to absolutely minimize the amount of negative externalities that will be experienced by people that come into contact with the surface that you have inflicted upon the world.
“Real” engineers understand this and that is why they are often seemingly irrational about their selective attention to detail.
Hacks and noobs are just unintentionally dumping plane loads of gum wrappers over our cities, nominally increasing human misery by tiny amounts without even realizing it… but in a population of billions, and more transistors than grains of sand on the planet, the overall effect is cumulative and significant.
That’s why people that understand their civic responsibility to do their job to the best of their ability look upon hacks and noobs with concern or sometimes active hostility.