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Raspberry Pi is looking into an IPO (Initial Public Offering).

But wait, Raspberry Pi's a non-profit! They can't do that? And who would want stock in Raspberry Pi anyway? Their core market hates them—they abandoned hobbyists and makers years ago!

And there are like tons of clones and competitors, nobody even needs Raspberry Pi? Plus, aren't they crazy-expensive? It's like a hundred bucks now, and that's if you can even find one to buy!

Well, hold on a second... there are a lotta misconceptions out there. In this post, I'll walk through what's actually happening, and also through things I see online.

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of a video on my YouTube channel, which you can watch below:

I frequently need to capture a window of some Mac app for a recording (usually for my YouTube channel), and I've used a little AppleScript I wrote years ago for the purpose.

Somehow, that script (which I saved as a 'one shot' App (.app extension) that just runs then quits) got deleted off my Script Editor folder in my iCloud Drive, so I had to re-create it.

Luckily, the syntax for this operation is dead simple:

tell application "Safari"
    set bounds of front window to {0, 50, 1280, 770}
end tell

You can adjust the {X, Y, width, height} parameters accordingly—note that the width and height seem to be additive to the X/Y. So I use 770 instead of 720 for the height (720 + 50).

In Script Editor, save the file as a .app, with the option to keep it running unchecked. Now, whenever you want a window sized perfectly for capture, just press Command + Spacebar, then type in the name of the Script/App you saved, and hit enter. The top-most window in Safari will scale to exactly 720p resolution.

I recently pulled a SATA hard drive out of a Linux box that I wanted to grab some files off of. I only had my Mac on hand, and I had a USB 3.0 to SATA hard drive adapter at the ready.

But when I plugged in the hard drive, macOS said it couldn't recognize the disk.

Makes sense, because macOS includes support for Apple's filesystems, not Linux (or even NTFS, Windows' preferred filesystem). There are commercial solutions you can buy, like Paragon Software's extFS for Mac, but that costs $39, and I don't want to deal with the licensing issues that may exist there if I just want to grab a few files off one hard drive.

Luckily, there are some open source libraries that allow at least read only access to ext4-formatted disks on macOS. Let's install them and use them to mount the drive:

First, install macfuse, using homebrew:

I just bought this N100-based Intel x86 mini PC (brand new), and it was cheaper than an almost equivalent—but slower—Raspberry Pi 5.

This GMKtec mini PC is called the Nucbox G3, and it comes with an Intel Alder Lake N100 4-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD, and Windows 11 Pro—and mine cost just $131, after a couple coupons.

That's... a lot of computer for a very good price. But the Raspberry Pi—the famous "$35 computer", should be well below that... right?

Well, I bought all the parts required to build a Pi 5 to the same spec—including the adapters and parts to assemble it into one small unit—and it turns out... the Pi is more expensive. And slower.

The Pi 4 still starts at $35 (for a 1 GB model), but the Pi 5 starts at $60 (for 4 GB) and climbs to $80 for the maximum 8 GB model.

Or at least that's the hope, based on current production rates.

At CES 2024, I had the opportunity to chat with Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's CEO. We discussed the future of AI on the Pi, RP2040's successor, the impending launch of Compute Module 5, and current production rates of Pi 4 and Pi 5 computers—Raspberry Pi's bread and butter.

The news is good: currently (as of last week), they are manufacturing Pi 5 at a rate of 70,000 per week. By the end of January? 90,000 per week.

That would put manufacturing capacity for Pi 5 alone at 400,000 units every month.

The MNT Reform's design, the components, everything—is open source. If iFixIt did a teardown, they'd probably give it an 11 out of 10.

You can replace individual battery cells! Some people with these laptops hacked in their own speakers, added more internal Ethernet, or even swapped out the CPU itself.

Does that mean I think you should buy it? No, probably not. It's expensive (starting at €1199), and it's built for a certain type of person. It's not gonna replace a MacBook or a cheap Chromebook.

But why does this exist, and why am I excited about it?

Disclaimer: The reform used in this review was sent to me for testing; it's already been shipped back to MNT Research. They haven't paid me anything, and they have no input into the content of this blog post.