Is it time to end our love affair with R-PI?

There are already a number of alternatives out there: Libre Computer, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, BeagleBone Black, and more.

Some are more powerful. Some offer additional features (and form factors). All run some form of Linux. And most of them are available today.

If your focus is the GPIO then boards like the BeagleBone are already a better option. And if your focus is a low-cost computing platform, then you can add in the NUC and a ton of other items.

Will the mass market move to one of these? Probably not. With so many options there will just be fragmentation moving forward.

The apparent shift of focus for Raspberry Pi Trading, LTD to industrial/commercial customers does imply it is time for the non-commercial market to consider alternatives.

However, I doubt any will become as ubiquitous as the Pi had been.

There are already a number of alternatives out there: Libre Computer, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, BeagleBone Black, and more.

Some are more powerful. Some offer additional features (and form factors). All run some form of Linux. And most of them are available today.

If your focus is the GPIO then boards like the BeagleBone are already a better option. And if your focus is a low-cost computing platform, then you can add in the NUC and a ton of other items.

Will the mass market move to one of these? Probably not. With so many options there will just be fragmentation moving forward.

The apparent shift of focus for Raspberry Pi Trading, LTD to industrial/commercial customers does imply it is time for the non-commercial market to consider alternatives.

However, I doubt any will become as ubiquitous as the Pi had been.

What surprises me is that Beaglebone was available way before Raspberry Pi's launch. Yet R-pi has replaced almost every SBC in the market. Not sure why..

IMHO, Marketing and availability of open source collaboration. RPi has a pleasant website aimed at kids and beginners, great support organization,  free online fun project books, all kinds of option cards with libraries, all being continuously improved. 

rsjawale24 I will say dito to robogary's comment. And BTW I really don't care for it, It has almost no I/O but It handles things well, like a complete VOIP phone system but you have to add a IDE drive and a second Network port for the phones via my Cisco VOIP switch.  but the dam thing will not support OpenBSD!! 

I'm going with price point.  The RPi is hard to beat in that category.  At $35, I could afford to try my hand at it and not worry as much about accidentally destroying it.  The Beaglebone is more affordable now, but I remember it being a bit pricey to start.  Some of the other SBC's now are priced beyond consideration for my limited skill set.

kmikemoo said:

Some of the other SBC's now are priced beyond consideration

I agree, those might be good for industry, but for myself as a hobbyist, and for general personal use, other options are much more useable and affordable - like tablets, laptops, those small cube type computers, or even used computers.

BeagleBone Black was superior in many ways technically, but suffered (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) a lot from:

• Unfamiliar Linux distribution (Angstrom) for quite a while
• Not enough space for a decent full Linux distribution, because the eMMC was small, so the eMMC lay redundant when micro SD was used, as just an extra unwanted cost. I can't recall if Angstrom on the eMMC even had enough space for a compiler, possibly not. This didn't keep up with the trend of just using the target device for native compiles, as the device performance increases. Just because in the past we didn't have enough resources on many SBCs, didn't mean we needed to keep doing things the same way, at least not from the hobbyist perspective. Business is a different matter.
• Poor user experience with (say) different sysfs paths for features like GPIO from time to time, rendering old helpful blog posts now unhelpful and (to beginners at least) entirely useless
• No C compiler for the real-time component for ages (years I think)
• What  kmikemoo says.  There were extremely poor pricing decisions. Production couldn't keep up, so their solution (clearly I guess by a technical person) was to hike the price. They were quite open that this was the reason for the increase in price. Kind of ridiculous because all that does is make people feel they are being short-changed. If you're really going to charge more then give people more.
• No decent GPIO libraries for C and a few other languages for ages. For example I had to write my own C library and self-support it for quite a while. So the overhead for getting stuff done with the BeagleBone Black was quite a bit higher, unless you were really into JavaScript (which did have some GPIO support).

I was at a conference once with a BeagleBone Black workshop. I was astounded by how much time and effort was required to get to the point of blinking an LED.

Now, granted, an SBC isn't an ideal platform for LED blinking. But still, the number of steps to get started was so high I ended up walking out of the workshop.

I never even got to doing anything much on the "Linux side."

And, as you pointed out, finding good references or tutorials is nearly impossible. There are so many different ways to do seemingly simple tasks that I could never figure out the exact search phrase I needed.

It's a powerful board and I appreciate its open nature. But it 100% feels like a platform designed by engineers for the engineers who designed it--not everyone else.

Just adding in yet another veggie reference: https://onion.io/

Yes, I remember hearing about the Beagle board many, many years ago.  But it was its price point that prevented me from pulling the trigger.

Economy changed. Now the Pi is cheaper but virtually not for sale. The BB is available.