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Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
276 points transpute | 5 comments | 04 Jul 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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whywhywhywhy ◴[04 Jul 25 14:03 UTC] No.44464674[source]▶
It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.

Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.

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1. sigmoid10 ◴[04 Jul 25 14:20 UTC] No.44464810[source]▶
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
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2. FirmwareBurner ◴[04 Jul 25 17:41 UTC] No.44466441[source]▶
>I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks.

You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market.

That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

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3. Nextgrid ◴[04 Jul 25 21:52 UTC] No.44468127[source]▶
> tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller".

You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.

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4. theshrike79 ◴[04 Jul 25 23:17 UTC] No.44468764{3}[source]▶
There were some NRF boards with Wifi IIRC, but Raspi just worked and you could just use Python to do whatever you needed with GPIO instead of messing about with the kinda-sorta C but not quite.
5. renw0rp ◴[04 Jul 25 23:21 UTC] No.44468795{3}[source]▶
Raspberry pi didn't have built in WiFi until raspberry pi 3 in 2016 (of course you could use a usb adapter). I think around similar time esp 8266 (cheap microcontroller with WiFi) started becoming popular