- Designing a custom PCB for a more PC-like Pi, but then not merging the functionality of the official M.2 HAT despite plenty of available packaging space. Being able to just slot in an SSD would greatly expand the operating envelope of the product.
- Sticking to Micro HDMI ports, again despite plenty of space & with everyone having standard HDMI cables already on hand, or surely able to procure them more affordably.
The PCB has plenty of space for an M.2 slot (and, in fact, the PCB has pads for the connector and mounting holes, and is appropriately silk screened). The case design is just not designed for user serviceability, so having the slot would not be particularly useful. Jeff Geerling talks about this to some length in his video.
Arguably, a non-user serviceable RPi is a bit of an odd choice, but the 400/500 are very much self-contained all-in-one products, which I guess makes it kind of reasonable.
Sure, but I'd expect a little lid to access the M.2 slot in the case design. "It's not that kind of product", but maybe it should be: Higher capacity microSD cards are more expensive than NVMe alternatives, which are generally faster.
Not to forget write cycles... Which can be real issue if you actually use system as desktop. In general NVME drives would likely be more reliable in long run.
I really would not enjoy storage being corrupted or dead on this kind of device.
A huge reason SD cards have been unreliable in the past is because of a lack of wear leveling functionality, and architecture assuming sequential writes (e.g. large buffers that require larger blocks of data to be erased and rewritten even when writes are small as is typical in random writes, resulting in excessive write cycles).
Modern SD cards have much more intelligent controllers that perform wear leveling and work with the OS to reduce excessive write cycles.
Not that they're as reliable as modern SSDs, but I'd be willing to bet a modern SD card from a reputable brand is as reliable as SSDs were a while back when they were generally regarded as reliable enough.
Almost every time I've teased the info out of people with failed SD cards on Pi's, either it's either physically damaged, or it's an off-brand, or it's an ancient card.
If this cost $5 more and had the M.2 slot and some way to access it reasonably easily, I would buy one immediately. Without that, I probably won’t buy one at all.
This thing is a desktop computer. The degree to which the performance is improved by using good storage is huge. Excellent NVMe disks in the M.2 form factor are cheap and widely available. Excellent SD cards are not so easy to find. Excellent USB devices are not as good as their M.2 counterparts, are more expensive, and are sufficiently awkward dangling out the back of an RPi 400/500 that’s it’s barely worth considering.
A lot of scorn for this latest offering from Pi, but I think perspective is important here. No, most of us here do not have a use for the Pi 500 or it's display, but in part so the world where a lightweight low-consumption device can open some doors for connectivity and learning, this looks like a great solution.
We tend to forget that not everyone on the planet has the same resources or needs we do.
>but in part so the world where a lightweight low-consumption device can open some doors for connectivity and learning, this looks like a great solution
I hear this repeated over and over again in RPi threads, but nobody ever provides any proof of developing nations using RPis as affordable desktop computers apart from some PR articles every now and then involving partnerships and donations.
This feels more of an opinionated viewpoint or stereotype from clueless westerners from rich countries they have on developing countries. $50+ for a RPi might be affordable computer for you when your average computer at home is $700+, but for people in developing countries even $50 is A LOT of money and they're not gonna spend it buying RPis.
As someone originally from a developing nation, most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper (nearly free) and more abundant than a new RPI 5 based computer, not to mention more versatile in what SW they can run.
Or, more recently people started using old Android phones to learn on because they're also cheap and abundant and can be used for coding/tinkering. But RPis, not so much.
The OLPC project intended to provide cheap computers to developing countries also failed in part because, just like a RPI as a computer, westerners don't understand the market of developing countries and do product development from their own privileged perspective.
This isn't meant to denigrate anyone's work or effort, just wanted to share the reality in the field that I encountered.
Oh and BTW, even in the rich west where I live now, a RPi5 is pretty expresive and impractical for a general purpose computer when you can find Core i5 laptops with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs for that money on the used market. And it comes with display and battery to boot and can be used on the go.
It's because in reality it just doesn't work that way, the reality of what education really needs is ways to collaborate on documents and sync those back to teachers, ways to broadcast or watch recordings of lessons and most of all reliability and control. In reality these needs are better served by Chromebooks or Android tablets. The fact that the Pi is a real computer and runs the real version of Python on a real OS while meaning a lot to the "maker movement" and hoddyist hackers it means nothing in the reality of teaching a child how code works which would probably be done more successfully in a web app and a web based Python interpreter or the wider reality of using a computer for work outside of code (most of the curriculum).
Personally I wish the world was different and those things mattered but in the reality of education it doesn't and as time goes on it feels more and more like the education manifesto of Pi feels opposite of reality. Take this like from their release:
"during the early days of the COVID pandemic, when we worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver thousands of Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kits and monitors to young people studying from home in the UK"
Like what use would that have been? The systems can't run Zoom, not powerful enough to handle Google Meet, they can't handle videostreams competently enough for a conference, they don't have a microphone, don't have a camera like how would this have helped anyone learn during COVID when the main requirement was video conferencing.
Advertising, PR, virtue signaling and maybe getting some kids into some embedded linux development who will then grow up and use the Pi in commercial products at work.
Win on all fronts for the RPi corpora-, sorry I meant foundation.
The reality is that the pi isn't a general educational product - it's a computing educational product. And that is fine. If a kid wants to learn about programming, about what goes on under the hood, it's a fine addition to their locked down school Chromebook.
But you can do that on a regular laptop/computer running Linux sine that's what RPi also runs. You don't need an additional RPi to learn what's under the hood of a device running Linux.
And that gets really, really complicated when you have 1 teacher and 200 students to teach that week, each with a different hardware configuration, differing skill levels, devices in various states of repair, etc.
RPi is pretty much the cheapest way to get a brand new, standardized device into the hands of each of 200 students, then give the same curriculum to each student that will work the same, with predictable errors the teacher is going to be more ready to troubleshoot, instead of trying to figure out why some kid's PC segfaults because of an error on a Broadcom device that was only available on devices manufactured in May of 2014 (but sold in September of 2017, the ones manufactured 05/2014 but sold before 9/2017 are perfectly fine) when he tries to use any function using sin in Python (but the libc one works just fine).
Schools have historically paid a premium for this, like the Basic Stamp, which was really just a PIC microcontroller preflashed with some other stuff on the PCB to help it run, and sold at a crazy markup, but was well integrated into a standard curriculum that gave every student the same starting point and something that a teacher could easily help hundreds of students with. It's also kind of why Arduino became so popular -- did the same thing, but a fraction of the cost.
One good reason is that you can try stuff that would screw your laptop. Whereas with a pi it's just flashing the card again.
I used to work for a company that sold pi kits for schools, you could let 7-9 year olds try stuff that teachers and parents would not let them do to a laptop. Totally breaking a computer and fixing it again is a great experience, but not one you want to have on your primary machine
Yeah, I'm going to second that. I've lived in (technically I am from what used to be a "developing nation" at the time), worked in, and worked with people from, "developing nations", both in education and industry. It's just not how things work.
The Pi is a good educational platform for e.g. Western organizations that need to kickstart education programs at a scale. It's infinitely easier to ship 100 Pis than to locally source 100 similar computers and set them up. And it's as good a platform for introducing people to computers as any, I guess. But it's not the kind of platform that gets "grassroots" adoption.
First off, if you live in a developing country, you want access to technology with wide-scale application (and the opportunities it brings). Realistically, what you want is something that runs Windows 11 or (dare dream...) macOS, that you can use to write mobile apps and games, web apps that target interesting and "hot" technologies and markets, learn system administration for contemporary platforms and so on. That alone kind of excludes anything that's not x86 or a Mac.
Hipster platforms for retrogaming and "radical simplicity" is something that engineering professionals in well-off countries can afford to do as a hobby. But if you're learning programming in the hope that it will be a development opportunity (for yourself and your family, or for your country, no matter what form it takes, whether you want to emmigrate or stay and develop your local industry) you want to learn things with real industrial relevance. The few Pis I've seen used in a scenario like these were almost exclusively embedded devices, largely because the Pi is an easily-available embedded platform, making it easy to outsource development for it.
But other than that? No, once you factor in shipping, currency conversion and all the accessories you need, a Pi is about as expensive as a hand-me-down laptop that can run a lot more software, with a lot less hassle, and isn't a fire hazard you have to be careful around with and/or fit into a makeshift case (because, if you have to scrounge money for a 50 USD Pi, even a 10 USD case is going to be kind of expensive).
I would add Chromebooks to your list of Windows and macOS computers. Chromebooks support video calls, are versatile, and offer a ‘good enough’ Linux system for educational use and light weight programming.
I use a $9000 macOS setup in my home office (stuffed Mac Mini and Apple’s very nice studio monitor). As a backup I have an older, but still very nice System 76 Linux laptop. I joke to my wife that everything I need to do, I can also do on my less than three hundred dollar three year old Lenovo Duet Chromebook - just not as efficiently. I had a friend who was a software developer for the Apache Foundation, paid well by IBM, and he only used a tiny NetBook laptop, little keyboard, tiny monitor, and he argued that using minimal hardware removed distractions.
Nah, the lack of hardware is a real problem in developing countries, and is something that OLPC and Raspberry Pi are well suited to solve. But hardware is the easy part -- the much harder part of the problem to solve is the lack of human capital in computing education, and that's the part of the equation OLPC missed.
For example, they sent hundreds of thousands of laptops to Uruguay, but they hardly got used for education because the teachers just simply didn't know how to use them or integrate them into the curriculum. But Uruguay continued the OLPC model under the Ceibal project, and it's only just now, ~15 years later, after teacher training regarding technology is far more widespread and teachers have far more experience in utilizing computers in the classroom, that it's starting to show effectiveness. And the OLPC model is considered a success in Uruguay, but it took over a decade of persistence to work itself out.
So this is actually something that RPi is tackling head on -- the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually working hard to develop curriculums meant to address challenges in developing countries, like poor internet connectivity (which means a curriculum designed to be self-sufficient), and then also putting a lot of effort into training educators. This is before they even try sending Raspberry Pi's out, and largely is designed around using the already limited computing devices they have (not RPis) because a lot of those governments are unwilling to invest in computer education (because they have bigger problems to worry about and consider things like every student having a computer to be a luxury when nutrition is a more pressing matter on the quality of education).
Frankly, even the idea of "most people there use x86 PCs or laptops from the used market or rescued from e-waste imports and repaired because they're much cheaper" is a fair bit of a luxury and lacking understanding of the challenges of computing education in developing countries once you leave the cities and start looking at rural populations. In Mexico, nationally, 45% of households have a computer and 56% have an internet connection. Once you go to rural areas, that's ~20%. And that's before you consider socioeconomic status and the disparity in access to computers and internet. Some stats put the lower-income Mexicans at 5% computer ownership nationally.
In Rural Mexico, it's normal for a computer lab of 30-50 computers to serve a school of 500-1,000 students, or for schools to have NO computers and instead send students to nearby schools occasionally to utilize their larger computer labs for learning computer skills, and that's the only computer access they realistically have. This is really a great use case for RPi's, but like I said -- the hardware is the easy part to solve. The fact of the matter is if you sent a crate of RPi's or any other computer to these schools, they'd sit in the boxes for years because they don't have the infrastructure or the human resources to start using them. And that's actually the part that RPi Foundation is focusing on first.
>We tend to forget that not everyone on the planet has the same resources or needs we do.
True, but we must also admit that misguided prejudices about resources can lead people to miss out on some very significant opportunities, as well.
By way of anecdotal example: I have a Pi 400 on my desk that I have used as a Linux development workstation for the past couple of years - in which it has performed superlatively, I might add. Its small and light and fast enough, yet works as a perfectly good performance metric/measurement for the projects I've thrown at it.
I used it to develop a scientific instrumentation and sampling product which has gone on to produce >$40million in revenue for the customer. I've used it to develop audio capture tools which have been integrated into the r&d facilities at a major audio hardware vendor.
So, even though it might seem 'underpowered' and 'un-sexy' for most such tasks, this particular embedded developer has been able to squeeze much value out of the limits of the hardware. Not only is it a good performance reference, but it has just enough oomph to allow me to avoid using cross-compiler techniques, and in that sense is a gateway device to so many very powerful embedded Linux development tools and methods.
I would have absolutely loved getting this as my first personal computer. The form factor is so cool, and even living in a first world country, that price tag is incredible.
I really don't understand most of the comments, who cares if it just has micro hdmi ports, no nvme (whatever it is, I don't think I would care if I was 16, and I don't think I care today either) or whatever you think is missing? It costs less than $100 and runs Linux!
16 year old me, back when I was 16, would also have found this amazing. The thing is that today, lots of things cost less than $100 and runs linux. Go on Ebay or Facebook marketplace, and you'll find a near unlimited supply of $100 laptops that will run Linux at least as well as this will, and there you even get a screen. Go to AliExpress and you'll find mini PCs with similar specs to this for around $100, and you'll get an x86 CPU and the option of also running Windows. There is lots of competition in the "costs less than $100 and runs Linux" market, and it is not clear why this is necessarily better.
who cares if it just has micro hdmi ports, no nvme
Clearly lots of people. Choosing to need a special 'weird' cable, that very few people have lying around, to plug it into a monitor or choosing the storage option with the much worse IO performance and reliability just seem like strange choices, given that making the 'right' choice probably wouldn't increase the cost by all that much.
The Raspberry Pi has three huge advantages over those other options:
1) GPIO, letting you do things like learning to flash LEDs or controlling robotic arms and getting ready to use a Pi Zero for robots or such.
2) Cool add-ons, like the Pi Camera or AI modules, and a product family such as compute modules, Pi Zero, etc. A strong third party market of Hats, etc.
3) SUPPORT. Pi 500 is available as part of a kit with the official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, which I know from experience in teaching people interested in learning this kind of stuff, is a really awesome getting started resource. But it doesn't stop there -- Raspberry Pi Press has a lot of freely available books that teach various topics, AND a monthly magazine to teach and inspire. Not to mention countless tutorials meant specifically for Pi and Pi OS.
This is really, really awesome.
Those ebay specials aren't going to satisfy any of these. And while direct RPi competitors do provide a response to the first point, they get weak on the second point, the RPi is pretty unique in the third point.
Radxa X4 board specifically has x86 N100, an M.2 slot (a short one) and GPIO (though you need to flash the on-board RP2040 to access them? haven't tried yet).
I'm quite happy with it as a cheap desktop.
Documentation is pretty OK? Nowhere like the tutorials ecosystem around RPi but Radxa are certainly trying to provide detailed info.
One sweet quality of RPi this lacks was being unbrickable — the entire state was on SD card; screw up and you can just write a new card. (Recent RPis complicate that with an a boot flash). But by now I've bricked enough RPis by electrical damage — including an 400 — to not be as excited about that :-]
I do agree with your analysis. All I'm saying is if one is considering a competitor, the X4 with x86 running mainline linux might be a safer bet than most less-documented ARM boards...
Those things are cool in their own right, but most of those belong within the context of someone looking to make something or learn electronics. Not necessarily something that someone looking to use one as a fully fledged computer is going to appreciate. And the Pi 500 definitely swings in the direction of computer.
The Pi 500 does definitely swing in the direction of the computer.
IMO the target demographic of the Pi 500 are people who want, first and foremost, a desktop PC, but one that is well suited to hobbyist computing and/or computing education.
Yeah, if you JUST want to run a word processor, browser, etc. one of those N100 PC's might make more sense. If you open up an issue of MagPi magazine and feel inspired, then the Pi 500 might make more sense. And that's what it really comes down to. Is computing, itself, a hobby or interest to you, or not?
I do find HN threads about R-Pi products weigh heavily negative. Yet despite the apparent many major issues that keep getting pointed out R-Pi seems to keep going from strength to strength. Maybe they understand their own customers and their market better than commenters here?
I use them quite a lot for various projects (mosty recently in my e-piano build, where the Pi 5 performs admirably pulling off low-latency audio for my piano VSTs - https://eikehein.com/piano), but while I vibe with the whole "sets a known standard, just works, network effects" advantages, there's some real annoyances that run counter to that.
For example, I'd expect the standard SBC from the Good Ones to have great upstream support, but it turns out a vanilla kernel doesn't support the Pi 5 until perhaps 6.13 due to lacklustre upstreaming efforts, meaning most alternative distros to the patched-up Raspberry Pi OS still don't support the Pi 5 properly. (I ended up managing to bake up a modified Fedora 41 because I wanted the much newer audio stack in said piano, but only with a lot of effort.)
And yes, the dreaded Micro HDMI ports, perhaps the weakest, shoddiest, most prone-to-failure port around ... why they'd put those on the keyboard one (the 500 linked here) is beyond me.
That said, I like a lot of the strategic choices they made with the RP1, and I suspect there will be more interesting HW from them coming down the pipe over time.
HN crowd is solid in some very narrow technical subjects. The more you deviate from those, the worse. It quickly degenerates into some incredibly stupid takes from people that clearly think very highly of themselves, and are unable to do any introspection.
R-Pi offerings are fine. It is supposed to be a cheap computer, and they could get something that costs less than 200 bucks with a monitor. Definitely not bad.
There is market for cheap new things. But this is at price point that for most people in the world it is not anymore "cheap". Around 100 is at level you kinda need to think about it. If it was half of that like Pis used to be back in time I would agree for it to be cheap.
Specially when you start adding up things. Like monitor, mouse, power. The total adds up and somehow it doesn't feel like great deal for most income levels.
Same goes for their other products. Numbers just don't make sense for lot of people.
In a few months there will be second hand RPi 500's on sale, presumably in the range of 40/60 $, so that price should be used for comparison against second-hand products, not the price as new.
There but why not get a cheaper Chromebook or similar device then. I find it extremely hard to believe that there are a lot of people who’d buy a RPi and don’t at least 1 PC already. It’s a device for enthusiasts and such.
N100 box is new and cheaper. 256GB, 16GB RAM HDMI, 2.5 Gb network, case, charger etc. Raspberry Pi is pointless as a "cheap" computer. It's good if you you are building something which requires GPIO.
In some parts of the world, that box is around the same price as a similarly kitted Pi 5 (though with 8GB of RAM), but certainly not cheaper.
Nothing against the N100 as an option, it's a great option for many use cases... but it's at minimum the same price (for a different type of computer), but typically a little more expensive ($150+)
I think if its a one off purchase for use as a general pc or learning tool that doesn't require GPIO something like a second hand thinkcentre or optiplex is probably the best option.
They'll be cheaper than a Pi 5 or Pi 500, plus often come with a keyboard and mouse in addition to the power supply. Sure, they arent going to be quite as power efficient but you're getting significantly more for your money, as well as repurposing second hand kit that might have otherwise ended up in landfill.
GPIO aside I struggle to think of a good reason to buy a Pi 5 for this sort of application, especially when the cheaper second hand alternatives have one thing the pi doesn't - upgradability.
On the N100's, they seem to occasionally get a fair bit cheaper. The GMKtec G3 Mini for example (8GB ram, 256GB SSD) was down to £67.55 on Aliexpress[1] recently for example.
I do like a good Pi but for a lot of applications they just do not make much financial sense anymore.
I’m all for second hand, and have gone in this direction myself for use cases, but you do need some bare minimum level of technical competency, or someone to guide you.
I’ve purchased several SFFs on eBay, and had some experiences with broken hardware.
If you’re purchasing this as learning tool, particular for kids/teenagers, that’s not going to be a great experience.
That’s really the market where something like the Pi 400/500 shines. It’s new, it’s going to work, and the documentation/tutorials are super accessible.
I'm not really referring to broken / questionable hardware here. I'm talking about ex office stock thats been flashed with a fresh copy of Windows and is ready to go out of the box, the same way any new PC would. That's far more accessible than a Pi.
I'd argue you need a lot more technical competency to get a pi running than a fresh out of the box mini pc.
I find that communities like these are far too focused on "TECHNICALLY CORRECT". Like, yeah, there are some things that technically are faster and cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, like that ebay special or that Alibaba-only SBC that's a direct copy of orange pi, or whatever.
But when it comes to things you can't glean from spec sheets, they utterly fail. Like the most important thing: the human experience. Like when it comes to Pi competitors, nothing even comes close to the Pi in having such an ecosystem of learning resources. I personally really appreciate the MagPi magazine as it's a great source of inspiration.
> I do find HN threads about R-Pi products weigh heavily negative.
The HN audience at large is still pissed that RPi chose to prioritize large industrial accounts over hobbyists during the Covid chip shortage era, and what few stock arrived at hobbyist distribution channels quickly got mopped up and re-sold by scalpers.
A few FOSS hardliners are pissed about binary blobs and a lack of in-depth documentation - which is something I do understand, after all RPi-as-an-ecosystem should be one of the larger accounts at Broadcom, so I'd expect the negotiators to finally make some progress on that front in a decade.
And others are pissed because Broadcom messed up Pi 4's PCIe implementation [1], or the RPi-side fuck-up with USB-C resistors.
And the final general group of pissed-off people I'm aware of - which again I support - are annoyed about the situation regarding the CSI and DSI (camera and display, respectively) interfaces. Cameras still are limited to official cameras only, and there's (almost?) no DSI compatible displays which means everyone has to pay HDMI licensing fees despite not needing to.
I too was alienated by RPi's supply and scalping situation – combined with their seeming contempt for the hobbyists, teachers, and students who had actively supported the platform.
Another unfortunate aspect is that Pi 5 has a list price of $50 vs. $35 for the 4 and earlier models (and also requires a more expensive power supply.) The price seems to be heading in the wrong direction.
And how successful the RPi 400 was? not saying it wasn’t but I doubt it was (after all it’s mainly a device for enthusiasts/toy) compared to their other products.
> Maybe
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not saying they don’t but do you think that’s true about every single company by default?
It's strange that they don't specify what gamut. I think it's possible that they mean 45% of the entire CIE gamut, which would be slightly larger than sRGB.
(It's an odd way of specifying a monitor though, usually manufacturers specify as a fraction of either Adobe RGB or Display P3.)
I expected it to mean 45% NTSC.. panel gamuts are usually specified in marketing as either 45% NTSC, 100% sRGB, or some % of adobe rgb/display p3 for wide gamut
Not sure why they dropped the NTSC, maybe consumers have cottoned on to NTSC keyword = bad monitor
I get that the target group probably is fine with running everything off of an SD card. But, I still think it's a mistake to not offer an M.2 slot without soldering.
The smaller drives are very affordable and the performance difference is huge.
The performance difference is practically unnoticeable in day-to-day desktop use. People don't really care about 15 second vs. 20 second boot time, and that first boot of Firefox is going to be another pretty meh comparison. Subsequent boots are going to be loading small enough data that the difference between will be meaningless.
The main appeal to an NVMe on the Pi isn't speed, it's cost effectiveness. SSDs are cheaper at larger capacities than SD cards. A 1tb SD card is 2x the cost of a cheaper 1tb SSD.
Storage speed is a bigger consideration on something like a gaming PC or a video editing machine, where you're going to be streaming gigabytes of textures/videos off of storage, not just trying to launch Firefox.
Love to see and I've been waiting for the Pi500 release for awhile. I'm running my house on Pi400s so the Pi500 will be a huge upgrade. They are still silent, have double the RAM, triple the speed, so whats not to like? Plus they will fit into the exact same desk crevice where the current Pi400s live.
I too have been excited about news of the Pi 500... I like it! I don't "run my house" (or NASA-level outdoor light displays [0]) with Raspberry Pi devices but I use the Pi 400 and an R.Pi 4 phatty as interchangeable workstations booting from a single external NVMe that I swap.
The R.Pi 500 has 8GB RAM (phatter than the Pi 400) and a much better thermal profile than the non-kb R.Pi 5 because of the mainboard design and heatsink.
As others have said, some opportunities for the R.Pi 500 may have been missed, such as M.2 or even a backlight for the keyboard. (Project: power an LED light from GPIO!) But the TDP, performance, and 8GB RAM are excellent features. And it's a portable system with keyboard ^_^
My ideal R.Pi would be using Display Port instead of HDMI but then the SOC (which has built-in HDMI) would be a different proposition. [1]
I’ve been using the new Pi Monitor for a couple of weeks. It’s very reminiscent of the easel-style Apple Displays from back in the day.
I’ve mainly been using it as a second display but plan to wall-mount it to show the family calendar, as they’ve made it really easy to flip the back leg and hang it on a hook.
I think these are going to sell really well into education and back offices.
I like the idea of a cheap pc/keyboard combination, it's a bit of nostalgia for the olden days of the the amiga 500 or the c64 or the atari st, but I also think it would still work great as a form factor, like mac mini inside a keyboard, maybe? But it has to be done right. Why in the pi 500 they kept the mini hdmi and did not add a connector for m.2 is a bit beyond me. There apparently is space and marking for an nvme on the board, but no connector.
I bought the 400 on a whim and it came in handy when both my main and space computer broke: If you connect a hard drive through a powered USB hub, you can actually use this for real work, albeit very slowly.
The word "Mediocre" comes to mind. Still using Micro HDMI, weirdly added unusable nvme ensuring people know its not the final product and if they want nvme they'll be having to pay for a replacement at some point down the line, plus increasing the price by around 30%.
Feels very much like they've given up even pretending to try and understand what their customers want. The micro hdmi thing is just incredibly stupid, they know full well how pissed off customers were over that yet did it again.
Not sure why you think I'm talking for everyone. This is a forum for discussion, where people share their views and opinions, mine was that it's mediocre, yours was that it's amazing. That's the great thing about opinions, we all have them, and people who slate other peoples opinions tend to look a bit silly.
Also if you read here, their own announcement blog post, X, Bluesky and Reddit you'll find theres a fair few people sharing my views regarding micro hdmi and the nvme shenanigans.
My guess is you wildly overestimated how much people care what you care about.
> Not sure why you think I'm talking for everyone.
Fair enough. I still think "mediocre" is a strong word for a <$100 product that’s a real usable computer, with this form factor. For a first computer for example, it’s NOT mediocre.
I understand that peoppe usually use medium PI boards for electronic projects. But other that, isn't it more cost effective and organized if you get minipc (something like N100 kit) for projects like backups machine or selfhosting projects?
There's trade-offs in both directions, but largely rPI has marginally lower performance and power consumption compared to the N100.
If you're not touching GPIO or need to stay under 15W strictly, then the PI is the better option. N100's seem to be slightly more expensive if buying from MSRP, but the second-hand market is much more competitive and there are more discounts available with N100 systems. RPI's are considered hobbiest tech so hold their value and are rarely discounted.
A raspberry pi 5 is still 2 to 3 times less power hungry than a N100. If one has no need for the power, it makes totally sense to just use a raspberry.
It's a pretty common sentiment I've seen and agree with. Though I think the Pi 4 is still cost effective for its price if you don't need as much processing power.
N100 blows it out of the water for anything that just needs uptime, reliable and fast storage, speed and video encoding/decoding.
You can get an N100 16GB ram with 500GB M2 storage for about $200 range, which if you were to spec out a Pi with a case, cooling, proper storage, correct cables you'd be getting close or past that.
Obviously electronics or GPIO projects I'd still go with Pi.
For home (mini) server use cases, cheap/unbranded x86 SBCs are also my favorites, especially because they can be easily expanded (I've put two disks for reliability).
Also, at least until some time ago, ARM compatibility was not always guaranteed by open source projects (I think nowadays it became ubiquitous).
You can sometimes even get new ones. I picked up 5 Dell Optiplex 3050's brand new in box on ebay last year for £58 (~$75 USD) a pop. Even came with a keyboard and mouse. You get a lot of office clearances on there where its places that have just bought excess then never ended up using them.
The ones I nabbed were the i7 6700T's with 16GB ram and a 128gb ssd. Total bargain and not at all that rare to find on there these days around that price point.
Oh they also all came with a Windows hardware license, not that I wanted it but another bonus.
This and the monitor, plus the lack of M2 slot (more below) make me think they have a cheap-o student laptop in the works.
- monitor can be powered from the pi 500 at 60%
- has built in speakers, plus some hdmi stuff to strip the audio line to a line out on the monitor for headphones/speaker
- there's gonna be a 16GB model
- add the M2 slot back as a "premium" feature
- the existing PCB will fit pretty nicely into a laptop case
plow all this into a laptop-like case with a touchpad and you have a ~$300-400 laptop with workable, real-world performance perfect for impulse purchases, kids, and hobbies. With market differentiators of
- low power
- low cost
- good software/hardware ecosystem
- gpio built-in
They're really only one or two steps away from this. I'd bet by next Christmas.
Yeah not sure why the link was changed from the official announcement to one of the reviews... confused me when I checked my comments and saw they were on a different post!
I was testing it for web dev, it's much better than the Pi 400/Pi 4 in that regard[1].
Still not near Apple M1 class performance, so you have to adjust expectations for media, creative stuff. But most things I've tested work fine now on the Pi if it works in Linux at all, which is a bit nicer than last time I tried 4 years ago.
I was also thinking that with the pi400, but that was clocked a bit faster than a pi4 if memory serves (the heatsink). Still, it would have been nice to have a CM5 that could later be upgraded to CM6.
Anyway it looks like a wait and see for the Amiga500+ version for me, that M.2 prep. looks worth waiting for. Any maybe they got some more red paint in by then.
Pi 5 is a great everyday desktop and development machine.
Some websites are going to perform really badly, like a lot of news websites with lots of ads, but those tend to perform bad on my gaming PC, too, and I just think if a website performs bad on a Pi 5 it's really just not worth visiting.
Unfortunately, it seems it cannot be used just as a keyboard for other devices.
I have a similar gripe with iMacs and most all-in-one PCs that they cannot be used as a monitor for other devices. Once the PC/Mac inside becomes obsolete, the whole device becomes useless even though it has an excellent display that still works.
Are you sure about that? Other pis can use gadget mode to act as a device (like a keyboard). Has that been specifically disabled somehow for the pi500?
That's not what I meant. I meant just using the keyboard part as a keyboard, out of the box, without the need to tinker with the pi's software and/or hardware.
I just decided to give a go at a pi5 last week. I was pretty enthusiastic and had planned to boot it via ssd, but after hours of trying to get the wifi chip working, I re-packed it and returned it.
I tried 3 separate high quality class 10 sd cards, re-wrote all of them twice, once with dd and then with rasp imager with no success. I couldn't connect to the home router (2.4g wpa3) even after syncing the channel and couldn't even connect to my phone's open AP. But it did connect to an open Xfinity AP. It could see all the available APs, but just couldn't authenticate or connect.
I booted the rpi3 to figure out wtf was going on and it connected to everything without trouble. I then updated the pi5, but the problems persisted.
I was only able to find a few posts describing the issue, but none with a reasonable solution.
The experience pretty much killed my enthusiasm for the pi5, but I remain interested in the nature of the bug. Any thoughts?
Seems like they should have used a compute module instead of building out a new PCB? Any idea why that wasn't done? Pretty damning not to dogfood your own product.
I don't think it's a dumb question, though I guess some might question its relevance. Side-comments can be interesting, though.
I don't know why they did it, but it follows the same pattern as the pi400 - develop a whole new board, rather than a daughterboard for the pi4 compute module. If I had to guess, it's probably about reducing e-waste: if someone wants a compute module and it's out of stock but there are pi500s available, why wouldn't they buy a pi500, strip the compute module out and dump the rest of the machine in the bin?
And to be fair to them, they're dogfooding a fair amount - the RP1 and the RP2 are in the design, rather than a generic southbridge and keyboard controller.
The lack of an M.2 slot is a massive disappointment. I was really hoping it'd have one as that'd make it a viable desktop machine. A micro SD as primary storage just doesn't cut it anymore.
The “trends in software” is the problem here: we’ve gotten greedy as developers and basically build assuming resources don’t matter. I am quite willing to bet that if we considered resources, we’d still be able to build all the stuff we want without assuming resources are free. Hardware would be viable longer. Efficiency unfortunately seems like the last thing anyone thinks about anymore, instead favoring time to market and layers upon layers that prioritize developer happiness and productivity over all else.
It's missing the connector and power components on the PCB so you may be able to solder them all on yourself if you have the parts but it's going to be a pain in the ass :D
Yeah; I attempted to solder on the slot... but realized after attempting it that all the power circuit components on the underside are also unpopulated. So you'd have to reverse-engineer that, get the components, solder all of them (many are tiny SMD), and solder on a couple caps on the top PCIe traces, and finally an M.2 slot on the pads up top.
Can you spec a N100 system with 8GB of RAM and at least 32 GB of (slow) SSD and land around the £100 / $120 price point of a Raspberry Pi 500 with 27W power adapter?
This[1] semi-random example comes with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD for $130 + $10 shipping. Here's[2] another form factor with similar specs for $140 with free shipping.
That said, I'm sure the included RAM + SSD isn't the greatest. The ones I got in my case (different model and store) has been working fine so far, but it's a bit of gamble.
As others pointed out, yes you can. But you can get even better specs and at a lower price on eBay. Any of the Lenovo or Dell mini pc's are cheaper (around £50-£70 depending on the model) on eBay and SIGNIFICANTLY more useful.
For people buying these as a computer the power difference isn't something that even enters their mind. How many average people do you see debating one tv over another because it uses 5w more power?
Even excusing used hardware you can litterally buy brand new ready to go windows based pc's in that price bracket.
Prices from Pimoroni. The price of a Pi 500 is £84.60 for the unit + £11.40 for the PSU + £3.90 for a micro hdmi adaptor (which I'm adding because almost everyone will need one). Giving you a total of £99.90 plus shipping. You'll also probably need more storage as it only comes with the 32gb micro sd (down to about 27gb after OS space) but I'll exclude that from this for now.
- For £74.99 including delivery & PSU you can get a Kuyia Win10 Pro Celeron J4105 mini pc with 8GB rand and 256gb SSD.
- For £80 including delivery & PSU you can get the GMKtec G3 N100 with 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD, or pay £10 more an get 16GB Ram, 512GB SSD.
Theres so many of these around now. I know people have a soft spot for the Pi but it's really not the best option for most applications, and hasn't been for a long time now.
All of these, for a desktop experience are better. All of them have hardware Windows licenses should they be wanted. All of them support Linux, all of them are upgradable.
Unless you need GPIO the prices just do not make sense, and if you're willing to buy used/refurb the leap in specifications is even higher.
I am the person you replied to. And I have personally bought brand new Lenovo and Dell mini pc's on ebay in that price range. I only didn't mention them in the follow up comment as they are admittedly snapped up very quickly so you do need to be on it to grab one.
- Designing a custom PCB for a more PC-like Pi, but then not merging the functionality of the official M.2 HAT despite plenty of available packaging space. Being able to just slot in an SSD would greatly expand the operating envelope of the product.
- Sticking to Micro HDMI ports, again despite plenty of space & with everyone having standard HDMI cables already on hand, or surely able to procure them more affordably.