A kitchen splashbork on sale at the Cardiff IKEA There is something wrong with IKEA's Raspberry Pis, as another branch suffers a suspiciously familiar failure in our 12 Borks of Christmas. Today's boot-ballsup was snapped at the Cardiff outlet of the purveyor of unpronounceable products and shows a Raspberry Pi in distress behind the sink in one of the spiffing kitchen …
to have the whole set... nah, he still needs to find some broken Android toilets. Still plenty of them around in the motorway service stations on the A2 in Germany, not fixed for months and all still showing the same errors as they were.
Which must lead the advertisers to thing they're, er, peeing their money away...
I can see what El-Reg's new year resolution must be...
To be even more snarky at Apple than ever before.
All I can say on the matter is that I don't regret jumping ship from Windows to Fruity laptops. I've just upgraded my 2015 model (used daily since then and has allowed me to write 4 novels and 1.9million words) to the latest software. The i7 that it runs would not support W11 yet runs macOS Monterey 12.1
Win some, lose some.
The lack of Mac bork examples in digital signage is presumably nothing to do with any perceived reliability of them.
I assume that Macs are considered too expensive for running such lowly functionality as digital signage and the lack of long term availability of older models would also be a red flag!
The biggest problem with using Raspberry Pis in these sort of embedded situations is the devs not doing everything in RAM to eliminate or at least vastly reduce writes to the SD card and likely the bean counters only authorising payments for the cheapest SD cards.
Most of the failures I've seen on Pis have almost all been borked SD cards.
It is hard to find a Pi SD card that will go the distance.
You certainly can't depend on a Pi Vendor for selling you a decent one, you have to do your home work yourself and source things on your own.
I think the answer really is for these embedded applications to really go with the CM4 with eMMC boot.
It’s down to the sd card using a FAT fs for booting which is super fragile, and most standard Linux having everything on an ext4 read/write partition. With some hackery putting most of the log files, tmp files etc in ram and mounting / read only I run my pi boat computer with a read only fs with no problems for nearly 4 years now, and have done similar for bananapis. But yes, in general this is why standard raspberry pi’s are *not* a good idea for grown up signage systems. Emmc is good, but you still want to run on a read only file system.
For digital signage, net boot would seem to be more appropriate and a USB SSD would overcome any SD card life limitations.
We used a load of Pis for production test a few years ago, all booting from the network they worked great testing thousands of products and easy to keep up to date.
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