> "...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features."
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.
Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
I agree that Raspberry Pi is not a good general purpose computer, but some of these criticisms are starting to feel like a pile-on with partially incorrect information.
> the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions
FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you will want a heatsink and fan. If you want to run some Python scripts in a Linux environment or even if you're doing heavy work and waiting longer is not a problem, you don't need extra cooling.
> and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port)
This hasn't been true in 10 years.
Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
> FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.
Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive.
Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it. Unless you're doing sustained workloads where you need all of the performance, allowing a little throttling is fine.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate
There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
On the other hand, the RP2350 actually is a microcontroller, and IMO a nice one for many purposes. PIO, high-quality datasheet, nice ecosystem, etc. And the Pi Zero 2(W) can do most things the Pi/Pi 2 could, with a smaller footprint and less power consumption. Variety is nice.
Do you have a reference for this? Looking around, I see it being beaten by other ARM SBCs, and even low end Intel devices.
Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the original Raspberry Pi when they were still relatively new. The performance per watt lagged behind even a beefy Intel box since the original Raspi was so slow that it destroyed any gain it got from using so little power.
They've never been particularly low-power, in a performance-per-Watt sort of way compared to other offerings at whatever present day. In recent times, I've seen completely-believable reports that N150 boxes walk all over it.
They've never been particularly cheap, in a performance-per-dollar sort of way. Used machines from eBay, yard sales, and old broken laptops (that still compute!) have always been better. (They usually come out OK when new is compared to new, though, which is IMHO the only valid comparison.)
Those comparisons were never very favorable.
---
The parts where it shines are: Small; they come in two sizes, and those sizes are small and smaller. That was new, but it's been cloned all over the place.
Built-in GPIO that's meant for people to actually-use and tinker with. That was new, too, but it's also been cloned. (Also: These days, anyone can plug a cheap Pi Pico into any PC with USB and get a fairly intense amount of GPIO to goof with.)
Standardization, and the appliance-like behavior this can enable. Lots of folks, including kids of all ages, just download pre-built images and swap SD cards like they would cartridges in a Nintendo. That's not for me, but it's pretty neat.
Community. They've still got a lot of momentum by being first at these roles. That's good. It helps newbs (who at this point may have never had anything resembling a "real computer" to play with ever before in their lives) to get started.
Low-power enough: It's not ideal when chasing tiny Watts for battery or small solar power, but you probably won't notice it on an electric bill (and despite the bizarro-world cooling rigs people put together, a passive heatsink really is good enough to keep it running in-spec).
raspberry pi has terrible power management as well. turning off a core was impossible on previous generations for example. a few years ago rpi was the worst of all sbcs we measured for battery powered usages. this was for an actual embedded product so it wasn’t going to be used either way (ask broadcom for some chips HAHA)
but there is very little reason to use a rpi over other sbcs if you have a remote idea what you’re doing beyond hobby use
Performance per watt is nice but I’d be more inclined to talk about “problems being solved per dollar.”
If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.
Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.
When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.
Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.
I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.
My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).
I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.
I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.
So I'm learning towards 512MB.
But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)
Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.
The 8GB Pi 5, at $170 [1], is encroaching on Jetson Orin Nano Super's $240 price point [2]. But the Jetson has a faster CPU (newer a78ae cores rather than a76) and, obviously, a whole-ass GPU.
Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process.
Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.
Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!
Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.
Yeah, one of my bigger complaints especially on the Nano was the GPU only had really limited model support (iirc, mostly tflite but maybe I'm misremembering) and it sounds like the newer ones are more normal. That and what seems from the docs to be better headless support would be major improvements. Going further to mainline distro support would make them interesting to me again.
I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.
A very small point, but pulling from a feather form factor BOM to compare.
$0.12 for microUSB female connector (rated 1A)
$0.26 for a USB-C female (rated 3A). Needs 2 x resistors (< $0.01), 20% larger board area
I think the power capabilities are the biggest item. If you want to pull higher current from a laptop for development or supply from a wall, you have to switch to USB-C.
I don't think either of these prices are that aggressive - pretty sure the cost comes down at volume.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile for them to produce both. Well, it will be hard to compare because the design cost doesn’t show up in the BOM, haha.
But it seems like it would be useful nowadays, since some laptop have mostly USB-C connectors, and USB-C to USB-C is pretty common. I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?
I have an unfair bias because I design PCBs as a significant part of my job, and switching out to USB on this board appears to be a non-issue.
I have a Pico in front of me, and there's plenty of room there for a USB-C footprint and the two 5.1k resistors. Given that, I cannot reasonably agree that the "design" stage is significant.
In other words, it's a change that I would make to my own board in 2-5 minutes because the stakes are low. My ballpark guess is that such a change at RPi would have to go through a proposal stage, a PCB change review, and then there would be dozens of places to update documentation.
Since backwards compatibility is non-optional, this would result in a separate SKU, which means that the whole distribution chain needs to be updated with a new product.
So, I acknowledge that when you're working at their scale any change like this is the definition of non-trivial. What I don't agree with is the conclusion that it's not still clearly the right thing to do.
For what it's worth there are third-party rp2350 boards with USB-C connectors if that's important to you. Heck, WaveShare has one with two USB-C connectors: https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-usb-c.htm
I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.
Everything they do from a compute perspective is just better with a mini pc or old laptop with a mobile spec chip.
Everything they do from a programmability perspective is just better with a microcontroller specific to the task.
I just don't see the actual market position for these things. They were supposed to be a cheap board, but you can't actually buy them cheaply because the vendors upcharge so much.
I think at this point the brand reputation and software quality are a big selling point.
If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor will be making the exact thing you bought for 5-10y.
For hobbyist stuff at home, I agree, though. A mini PC is probably better for homelab stuff, and an RP2350 or ESP32 is probably better for anything embedded or battery powered that you want to do.
> I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.
It's amazing how well these fit into the category of products that people feel compelled to buy, play around with, and then forget about.
Flipper Zero is another product that landed in the same space.
What's sad is that Raspberry Pi does have a lot of legitimate use cases and people who want to use them, but the supply has always been swamped by all of the demand.
* Replacement controller for my UFO Catcher - It has WiFi, easy to update, and I can operate the machine remotely with it. It's bolted to the back of small touchscreen that lets me change the machine settings as well.
* Remote printer access - I can monitor from the USB cameras and gather statistics about the prints.(I suspect a lot of 3D printing enthusiasts use them for this purpose.)
Having a small low power computer has been useful for me in those instances.
Obviously the business model is selling a $30-100 SBC to jerks on Hacker News who simultaneously brag about buying literally every single model, but apparently have no use case for them. Even better, these schmucks will never plug the product in, never submit a warrantee, and never harass support. Brilliant model!
Would love to see actual security focused hardware/software features, like full OP-TEE, fTPM (or a more ideally a real physical TPM), and similar. For example, so that the OTP isn't the only way to store a disk encryption unlock key.
The existing secure boot mechanisms aren't bad, but allowing for more than one public key hash in OTP would be nice, too.
These kinds of things are expected to be on modern embedded SOCs and SOMs now.
I recently found out about the Radxa Dragon Q6A. A Qualcomm chip with faster CPUs, a good GPU, a DSP and AI accelerator, and a hardware video encoder seems very compelling. It even supports Windows if you want that for some reason.
I run the media lab at one of Europe's must prolific art universities. The variant I tend to use most is the 3B+.
Reasons:
- full sized HDMI connector
- headphone connector
- good bang for the buck
If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.
The only way I'll buy another raspberry pi is if they come with a power supply that's guaranteed to work with them. I got tired of the random reboots in the night and replaced my media center/NAS with an old Nuc.
> "...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features."
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.
Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
I agree that Raspberry Pi is not a good general purpose computer, but some of these criticisms are starting to feel like a pile-on with partially incorrect information.
> the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions
FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you will want a heatsink and fan. If you want to run some Python scripts in a Linux environment or even if you're doing heavy work and waiting longer is not a problem, you don't need extra cooling.
> and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port)
This hasn't been true in 10 years.
Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
Raspberry Pi foundation has released microcontrollers that run MicroPython in a very user-friendly format https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/m...
> FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.
Agree with your other points.
Having the burst performance is helpful.
Most light workloads are very bursty. When you type a command or click on something you want latency to be low. Having the overhead to get it done quickly at the full clockspeed is good if you are latency sensitive.
Throttling has become a bad word. Some feel compelled to avoid it at all costs, doing things like buying big coolers and running synthetic benchmarks to avoid it. Unless you're doing sustained workloads where you need all of the performance, allowing a little throttling is fine.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate
There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
On the other hand, the RP2350 actually is a microcontroller, and IMO a nice one for many purposes. PIO, high-quality datasheet, nice ecosystem, etc. And the Pi Zero 2(W) can do most things the Pi/Pi 2 could, with a smaller footprint and less power consumption. Variety is nice.
And to the GP's point - the Pi Pico can be programmed in Micro Python.
Performance per Watt still outranks any other (quasi-)mainline linux device
Do you have a reference for this? Looking around, I see it being beaten by other ARM SBCs, and even low end Intel devices.
Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the original Raspberry Pi when they were still relatively new. The performance per watt lagged behind even a beefy Intel box since the original Raspi was so slow that it destroyed any gain it got from using so little power.
EDIT: One set of benchmarks I found as an example: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Performance-Per-Watt
They've never been particularly low-power, in a performance-per-Watt sort of way compared to other offerings at whatever present day. In recent times, I've seen completely-believable reports that N150 boxes walk all over it.
They've never been particularly cheap, in a performance-per-dollar sort of way. Used machines from eBay, yard sales, and old broken laptops (that still compute!) have always been better. (They usually come out OK when new is compared to new, though, which is IMHO the only valid comparison.)
Those comparisons were never very favorable.
---
The parts where it shines are: Small; they come in two sizes, and those sizes are small and smaller. That was new, but it's been cloned all over the place.
Built-in GPIO that's meant for people to actually-use and tinker with. That was new, too, but it's also been cloned. (Also: These days, anyone can plug a cheap Pi Pico into any PC with USB and get a fairly intense amount of GPIO to goof with.)
Standardization, and the appliance-like behavior this can enable. Lots of folks, including kids of all ages, just download pre-built images and swap SD cards like they would cartridges in a Nintendo. That's not for me, but it's pretty neat.
Community. They've still got a lot of momentum by being first at these roles. That's good. It helps newbs (who at this point may have never had anything resembling a "real computer" to play with ever before in their lives) to get started.
Low-power enough: It's not ideal when chasing tiny Watts for battery or small solar power, but you probably won't notice it on an electric bill (and despite the bizarro-world cooling rigs people put together, a passive heatsink really is good enough to keep it running in-spec).
raspberry pi has terrible power management as well. turning off a core was impossible on previous generations for example. a few years ago rpi was the worst of all sbcs we measured for battery powered usages. this was for an actual embedded product so it wasn’t going to be used either way (ask broadcom for some chips HAHA)
but there is very little reason to use a rpi over other sbcs if you have a remote idea what you’re doing beyond hobby use
Performance per watt is nice but I’d be more inclined to talk about “problems being solved per dollar.”
If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.
Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.
When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.
They'll do whatever they do.
Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.
I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.
My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).
I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.
I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.
So I'm learning towards 512MB.
But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)
Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
A Raspberry Pi with sleep and hibernation is like asking Valve to make Half Life 3. They just can't. It doesn't compute.
I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.
The 8GB Pi 5, at $170 [1], is encroaching on Jetson Orin Nano Super's $240 price point [2]. But the Jetson has a faster CPU (newer a78ae cores rather than a76) and, obviously, a whole-ass GPU.
[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/673711/raspberry-pi-5
[2] https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-ori...
Nvidia's software platform for the whole Jetson series was, at least in my experience, absolutely awful on the Jetson Nano and Orin boards I worked on. Has that improved at all? I did not appreciate that the only option they provided was a full desktop version of ancient Ubuntu... and even flashing the OS image was a bizarre process.
Edit: looks like they at least have a better headless option now.
Nowadays upstream Linux with UEFI mostly works, with their out of tree drivers. I’ve managed to make it work in NixOS with the stock kernel. Look at the open embedded L4T project, they have some recipes for building that. No need to use nvidia’s kernel anymore!
Also, supposedly on the second half of 2026 they were going to be moving even more stuff out of their Jetson-specific drivers as they already do for their slightly newer chips (so you could use the standard drivers, and standard CUDA builds). Let’s see how that turns out.
Yeah, one of my bigger complaints especially on the Nano was the GPU only had really limited model support (iirc, mostly tflite but maybe I'm misremembering) and it sounds like the newer ones are more normal. That and what seems from the docs to be better headless support would be major improvements. Going further to mainline distro support would make them interesting to me again.
I was always disappointed by the Nano as it was a pretty capable device, but it seemed like not many people picked it up as a platform for cool things which I always attributed to the software.
The 16GB Pi 5 makes the Orin Nano look afforadable.
Pi's refusal to drop a USB-C on Pico due to cost increases is a terrible call IMO.
I seriously cannot fathom being someone doing development who wouldn't pay $0.50 extra to purge the last micro USB from their desktop.
A very small point, but pulling from a feather form factor BOM to compare.
$0.12 for microUSB female connector (rated 1A) $0.26 for a USB-C female (rated 3A). Needs 2 x resistors (< $0.01), 20% larger board area
I think the power capabilities are the biggest item. If you want to pull higher current from a laptop for development or supply from a wall, you have to switch to USB-C.
I don't think either of these prices are that aggressive - pretty sure the cost comes down at volume.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile for them to produce both. Well, it will be hard to compare because the design cost doesn’t show up in the BOM, haha.
But it seems like it would be useful nowadays, since some laptop have mostly USB-C connectors, and USB-C to USB-C is pretty common. I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?
> I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?
They do, in spades: https://www.amazon.com/3FT-Micro-Data-Charge-Cable/dp/B0DDWH...
I look forward to the day when they're no longer necessary.
I have an unfair bias because I design PCBs as a significant part of my job, and switching out to USB on this board appears to be a non-issue.
I have a Pico in front of me, and there's plenty of room there for a USB-C footprint and the two 5.1k resistors. Given that, I cannot reasonably agree that the "design" stage is significant.
In other words, it's a change that I would make to my own board in 2-5 minutes because the stakes are low. My ballpark guess is that such a change at RPi would have to go through a proposal stage, a PCB change review, and then there would be dozens of places to update documentation.
Since backwards compatibility is non-optional, this would result in a separate SKU, which means that the whole distribution chain needs to be updated with a new product.
So, I acknowledge that when you're working at their scale any change like this is the definition of non-trivial. What I don't agree with is the conclusion that it's not still clearly the right thing to do.
I've always used USB-C to USB-A dongle + USB-A to micro B.
For what it's worth there are third-party rp2350 boards with USB-C connectors if that's important to you. Heck, WaveShare has one with two USB-C connectors: https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-usb-c.htm
There are broadly available third party RP2350 boards with subc and a variety of additional capabilities if that is important for you.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/collections/rp2350
https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-pro-micro-rp2350.html
https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2913.html
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeed-XIAO-RP2350-p-5944.html
I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.
Everything they do from a compute perspective is just better with a mini pc or old laptop with a mobile spec chip.
Everything they do from a programmability perspective is just better with a microcontroller specific to the task.
I just don't see the actual market position for these things. They were supposed to be a cheap board, but you can't actually buy them cheaply because the vendors upcharge so much.
I think at this point the brand reputation and software quality are a big selling point.
If you're trying to build a couple of units of some embedded thing where you need to toggle some GPIOs or serial devices in response to requests over the network, but don't have the expertise or resources to do it with a microcontroller, a Pi is a great option - you know you'll have software support, and you know that the vendor will be making the exact thing you bought for 5-10y.
For hobbyist stuff at home, I agree, though. A mini PC is probably better for homelab stuff, and an RP2350 or ESP32 is probably better for anything embedded or battery powered that you want to do.
> I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.
It's amazing how well these fit into the category of products that people feel compelled to buy, play around with, and then forget about.
Flipper Zero is another product that landed in the same space.
What's sad is that Raspberry Pi does have a lot of legitimate use cases and people who want to use them, but the supply has always been swamped by all of the demand.
My use cases:
* Replacement controller for my UFO Catcher - It has WiFi, easy to update, and I can operate the machine remotely with it. It's bolted to the back of small touchscreen that lets me change the machine settings as well.
* Remote printer access - I can monitor from the USB cameras and gather statistics about the prints.(I suspect a lot of 3D printing enthusiasts use them for this purpose.)
Having a small low power computer has been useful for me in those instances.
> I just don't see the actual market position for these things.
Isn't it mainly for learning and hobby-ism?
Obviously the business model is selling a $30-100 SBC to jerks on Hacker News who simultaneously brag about buying literally every single model, but apparently have no use case for them. Even better, these schmucks will never plug the product in, never submit a warrantee, and never harass support. Brilliant model!
I'm a jerk because I've bought them and tried to find a use case for them, but found they weren't as good as other solutions?
You have issues.
Would love to see actual security focused hardware/software features, like full OP-TEE, fTPM (or a more ideally a real physical TPM), and similar. For example, so that the OTP isn't the only way to store a disk encryption unlock key.
The existing secure boot mechanisms aren't bad, but allowing for more than one public key hash in OTP would be nice, too.
These kinds of things are expected to be on modern embedded SOCs and SOMs now.
A physical TPM with their overall high-quality software support would be awesome.
I've spent far too much time messing around trying to get TPMs working over SPI or I2C to meet security requirements with 4Bs and 5s over the years.
I recently found out about the Radxa Dragon Q6A. A Qualcomm chip with faster CPUs, a good GPU, a DSP and AI accelerator, and a hardware video encoder seems very compelling. It even supports Windows if you want that for some reason.
I run the media lab at one of Europe's must prolific art universities. The variant I tend to use most is the 3B+.
Reasons: - full sized HDMI connector - headphone connector - good bang for the buck
If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.
The raspberry pi CEO said that some of the boards will be delayed because of RAM prices.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Raspberry-Pi-discusses-Zero-3-...
The only way I'll buy another raspberry pi is if they come with a power supply that's guaranteed to work with them. I got tired of the random reboots in the night and replaced my media center/NAS with an old Nuc.