The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> 3) Lower RAM;
> 4) Lower perf;
Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the BeagleBone Black probably performs better for most workloads.
In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
It disappoints me greatly that people never seem to have a genuinely good answer for this when I ask.
> The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)
> Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.
Most people buying don't notice such things. Also, the BBB is at-least $10 more expensive.
> In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.
For people with principles in favour of Free & Open computing (like me) who are buying for personal use, perhaps. Unfortunately for this argument, most people don't care about that. In fact, I'm currently supporting a product shipping with the RPi 3B in quantities large enough to qualify as "real quantities".
We don't talk to Broadcom. As you note, they simply do not care if you're not very big fish. Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a big enough fish, and they do care, so we talk to them instead.
RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.
My Beagle Bone Black gets no use at all. I find its only redeeming quality the little deterministic helper cores, but in practice I'd rather use an FPGA/CPLD.
For everything else, memory size, network speed, and flash speed trumps everything. For me ODROID XU4 is the best, followed by ODROID C2. The thinker board looks like a contender but I was disappointed by the comparison to RPi3 whose strengths (community) and weaknesses (everything else) are long well understood.
Seeed studio's beaglebone green wireless is the real sweet spot for me. Right around $50. Wifi and bluetooth working OTB. I have no need for HDMI, or Ethernet, so giving these up is a win win for me.
I am with you as a fanboy of the beaglebone's ecosystem, given the fact that its now over a decade old processor, there are mountains of technical reference manuals if you really want to get low level with an RTOS, or just write your own kernel drivers. There are plenty of solid tutorials on Adafruit, as well as from Derek Molloy, and probably others I'm not even aware of. There is a nice ecosystem of shields, capes, or whatever the trademarkable noun we're supposed to use is. The hardware has gone through a boat load of permutations, to provide many things to many users, whether thats different variants of the standard credit card size board, or the pocket beagle, which is as spartan as it gets.
But as an observer of previous economic trends, as they relate to competing technologies, I have to say it makes perfect sense that Raspberry Pi is the market leader. If people wanted higher quality music, they wouldn't have adopted the cassette tape, or the CD, or the mp3. If people wanted higher quality video, they wouldn't have adopted VHS. The masses have so far always valued convenience over quality when it comes to gearlust.
But just like all entrenched players, someone out there will likely pull the rug out from raspberry pi, just when they think they've finally captured the market. My bet is on all of the Armbian boards, mostly Allwinner, but not exclusively. The BananaPi, OrangePi, NanoPi, etc are all pretty much at feature parity or better with raspberry pies they are clones of. They also have a pretty vibrant ecosystem with Armbian, which has great ncurses menus for just about everything that needs to be setup as an enduser. Besides the marketing push, I don't see a single thing Raspberry Pi does better than the Armbian/chinese clone ecosystem.
Well, they are more expensive, though by just a little. The low price really seems to be the deciding factor for most people. I’m likewise baffled by the lack of popularity of some of these other boards. Thr RPi is honestly getting quite long in the tooth and just $10-15 more can get you a way better board.
Couple of years ago we were looking for an board to run embedded Linux. Anything relying on an SD card was a no go for us. Talking to a few friends with a bunch of experience with SD cards in industrial settings say they purchase high end ones from specific vendors. Otherwise it's just a question when it will fail. Industrial grade SD cards cost more than the $10-15 needed to get an SBC with eMMC.
Bit of warning about the Beaglebone Black. The power controller doesn't have proper brownout detection.
It depends on what you mean by "fully open" (i.e. you want the mask set and design files too...?), but if you're just looking for a PC-on-a-chip, there's this:
1) Far more open (you can get documentation and chip supply to build your own BeagleBone)
2) No more expensive
3) Mainline Debian