Why is a Yun more expensive than a Raspberry PI ?

Now that I have bought a Yun I fee entitled to carp.

I can't see any obvious reason why a Yun costs more than a Raspberry PI. At the moment the Yun is about twice the price of an RPi.

OK, the Yun has WiFi. But there are many RPi features that it does not have.

...R

Raspberry and Yun are two different boards, it's hard to compare them with the price.

You can see a Yun like a linux embedded system (like the Raspberry) with WiFi and connected to an Arduino Leonardo.

If you sum the cost of a Raspberry plus the cost of an Arduino Leonardo and a WiFi dongle the two prices become very similar.

Atheros - now part of Qualcomm.

Jesse

jessemonroy650:
Atheros - now part of Qualcomm.

What is the significance of this?

...R

Robin2:
What is the significance of this?

...R

Maybe MIPS is more expensive than ARM.
Maybe RPi has more demand than Yun, thus the price is lower.

mart256:
Maybe MIPS is more expensive than ARM.

Not £28 more expensive !

Maybe RPi has more demand than Yun, thus the price is lower.

I always thought "price" and "demand" were two sides of the same coin.

My inexpert guess is that there is marginally less expensive stuff on a Yun compared with an RPi.

...R

Robin2:

jessemonroy650:
Atheros - now part of Qualcomm.

Jesse

What is the significance of this?

...R

Atheros has for sometime offered wifi connectivity for a higher price, but better support software. For years they supported the "Open Software" community - without reservations. Recently Qualcomm bought Atheros, and the purchase (by Qualcomm) has brought on "reservations" with the "Open Software" community and has raised the prices across the board.

At this point it's unclear if "Atheros" will have support from the "Open Software" community. Just before the purchase, Atheros did a 180 on some "Open Source" releases and caused many, many contractor developer to resign their positions. Of course, Atheros had to recover the cost of finishing products on-time.

Jesse

jessemonroy650:
and the purchase (by Qualcomm) has brought on "reservations" with the "Open Software" community and has raised the prices across the board.

I get the impression from your comments that this takeover happened after the Yun was first released.

Does this mean that for every Yun now sold a royalty has to be paid to Qualcomm?

  • I doubt if it is £28 per board, or even £14.*

If not, I can't see how the price of the Yun is affected?

I agree it is a pity if a previously pro Open Source policy has been rescinded.

...R

Angelo9999:
Raspberry and Yun are two different boards, it's hard to compare them with the price.

You can see a Yun like a linux embedded system (like the Raspberry) with WiFi and connected to an Arduino Leonardo.

If you sum the cost of a Raspberry plus the cost of an Arduino Leonardo and a WiFi dongle the two prices become very similar.

What?
First, inside Yun there's something really far away from RPI, no GPU, processing power very limited and limited resources, it's a router CPU and RPI was made for a smarthphone.
Second, a WiFi dongle cost 5US.
Third, leonardo CPU it's ridiculos cheap
Sum all and you still far away from a price of RPi. I agree, YUN is a fail, it's too costly and technically is not open source.
Most recent arduino products are too costly, look at Zero for example, it should cost at list half of current price (and it's still costly).

The cost difference is one of the reasons I switched to the Pi completely. A Pi version 3 has builtin WiFi too for the same prize (35 euros). The Pi is also way faster (1.2GHz vs 400MHz) and has more RAM (1GB vs 64MB). The Yun needs half of the RAM for its OS (Linux); that effectively results in 900MB vs 32MB.

Hooking up a Leonardo to the Pi is a breeze too: connect the Serial1 line of the Leonardo to /dev/AMA0 and disable any shell on that line. There's one small gotcha: when/if the Pi heats up, it starts throttling the baud rate on that line, so 115200 baud can be too fast for communication between the two processors (I use 19200 baud).

The Pi also supports a native gnu compiler and a much better Java version (Oracle Java 8 vs Jamvm version 5 and lousy GNU classes).

imho the Yun is way too expensive and the Pi is much more reliable.

kind regards,

Jos