Some people really don't have a lot of disposable income. Are you saying we should just stop thinking about making products accessible to those people? You seem to think that these rich "hobbyists" make up the entire population, but I'd bet there were at least ten families in the US who couldn't afford a computer for every "hobbyist" that bought one. What a bunch of elitist gate-keeping nonsense.

These low-cost SBCs are often viewed as a gateway product for introducing people to technology they wouldn't otherwise have access to - a system that could be a serviceable PC or launchpad for hobby electronics. The hobbyists you mention, apparently flush with cash and not a care in the world, aren't the people who need the price break. It's low income families with kids that need access to resources that might lead to a better future.

Not to mention that a Raspberry Pi is an embeddable system. It might be a small part of a much larger project, so even a low price might be hard to justify.

But no, let's keep making everything expensive so that computers and technology careers are only accessible to families that already have wealth. We, the Hobbyists of lore, can strut about the city square in our wearable devices and augmented reality headsets while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...

This is such an out of touch comment. Not every, definitely not a majority, hobbyist spend thousands of dollars on their hobby. You sound like a rich kid who doesn’t understand $8 milk is expensive.

If you're a child not earning your own money, price point matters enormously. I remember rarely ordering electronic components from Maplin because of the P&P charge which was massive compared to my pocket money.

Though I did get a buzz from my first CASHTEL order: https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Mapelin/Maplin%20Electronic...

Inexpensive isn't a fixed value. A hobbyist can be someone able to splurge thousands on tech because they find it fun, but they may as well just be someone who only has 50€ at the end of the month and wants to tinker with a microcomputer they read about online.

There exists life outside of the first world where that 10 dollars is worth more

As a software guy I make far more than average. Yet in this past year I have looked at and rejected buying for my hobbies many $$$ worth of toys because I cannot afford it. Well I could, but my family vacation took priority (this could be considered part of the hobby budget). Most years the total cost of things I want for my hobbies exceeds my annual pre-tax income, but this year made an effort to not look and I still came close.

At least as someone who makes a lot of money I have plenty of good food and a dry roof over my head. However that doesn't mean I have infinite money in the hobby budget.

I dunno, as a kid if there was a $40 or a $80 thing, I would get the $40 one (both would involve negotiating with parents anyways, and there's an obvious big gap here).

$40 is a lot of money for teens without income (which is the case for most teenagers across the world outside of the US). Most kids get money maybe once or twice a year and have to spread it out, and then negotiate for other hobby-based purchases when they can. There's a reason forums are filled with people discussing how to maintain sub-$100 Thinkpads!

> I mean, when you're talking about things (items in your "finite hobby budget") that cost less than a hundred dollars, why are you going to fuss about the "price point?" I am intrigued by how much this appears to matter to people who comment on Raspberry Pi threads.

Usually an SBC is just one item on a project's part list. If I can get one that's equally suitable and 20 Euro less, that's another bunch of sensors, or another smart light, or a few additional PCBs, or a spool of filament, or another display, or other peripheral, or another filter for my photography kit.

> Is there some missing context here, like "...and they only have ten dollars to spend on hobbies during the entirety of 2023 due to the famine wracking their homeland?"

People in that kind of situation will probably not be looking at a Pi 5 for a hobby project. A lot of people are better off than that and still not in a place where a hundred dollars here and there isn't even worth thinking about. I try to limit hobby expenses because that allows me to have more projects and play with more things without cutting into anything more important.

> Hobbyists spent, at times, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on microcomputers in the eighties, and that was real money back then. Even the quaint ZX whatevers that were sold in Europe were, in inflation-adjusted terms, much more expensive than a Pi.

At least for the things I do, that's a wildly inaccurate comparison. A Pi is more like a drop-in part like an electrical component would have been back in the 80s, and most hobbyists would not have paid thousands for a specialized diode or the like, and most wouldn't have bought another personal computer for a new project. The closest analog to a proper computer back then would be my laptop, and I did pay "real money" for that. I don't buy Pis as standalone personal computing devices, they're for automation that I can't or don't want to fit on a microcontroller. Two Pi 4s are running Home Assistant deployments, another (zero W) is driving an e-ink info screen, one Pi 3-something sits inside a half-assembled robotics kit, I had another 3-something running OctoPrint until recently. If I had to pay "real money" for any of those, I'd just do without.