Love the fact community is already mocking the fact they have distribution issues. While I had Twitter account their PR team was going full force demonstrating how it can be used and promoting projects that use it... all the while it's out of stock everywhere, constantly. I would have number of sites "notify" me when they are back in stock, only to be sold out seconds after. Luckily kind person shared a site which tracks where it can be purchased and for what amount but the mere fact such a tool has to exist just shows there's a serious problem.
Doesn't sound like the 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on' that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.
The project goal has never been a 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on'. The whole point of the project is to build a small cheap PC to give away to school children to increase computer literacy, while making it attractive enough for normal people to buy to fund the charity side
It's not the everyman buying from scalpers its industry buying cheap pis over plc, when it's that much cheaper scalper prices isnt much to them. And they need them NOW. Gotta love just in time manufacturing.
That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.
To be fair, I'm guessing the majority of Pi's are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won't be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.
It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.
Currently, and I could be wrong, the alternative to a Pi 4 from Pine64 now would be a Pine64's Quartz64 Model B. A Star64 might be interesting, but that's RISC-V so who knows what OS you could boot on it currently and if it would even be stable.
Plus with the Quartz64 Model B, who knows if you'll able to get a good case for it. There's the $28 “Model B” ALUMINUM WATERPROOF ENCLOSURE, but, eh, no thanks. There's the open enclosure, but that's also a no for me. I want a case I can hide the device itself, the cables, put a heatsink and fan on, be able to use an SSD with USB connect and connect a power supply all stuffed in a case. Which you can find plenty of for Raspberry Pi's.
Not to mention the Pi 5 isn't even out yet, and it's entirely possible it'll be better than the Quartz64 Model B, on top of having a ton of accessories. Plus, I can Pi up practically any Pi at the Microcenter or similar store near me as opposed to having to pay for good shipping.
I'm totally for having alternatives to the Pi, heck I might pick up a Quartz64 Model B if I can find a case, but a lot of alternatives don't have the same support and accessories the Pis do.
I've been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade --- think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.
My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that's not really relevant for me (headless, and don't really care about transcoding).
I ordered an OrangePi 3 recently for pihole purposes and it has been great, it’s also probably overkill for this use but hey it was actually in stock and not terribly expensive.
I’m running Emby with 4k content from an Odroid HC-2. If you have a 4k TV it should support the H.265 codec without transcoding so the resources for sending videos is low.
One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface.
IIUC PCIe2.0x1 means 0.5GB/s, which is slower than USB 2 (I'm talking USB 2 specs - no idea how USB actually performs in PIs). I can't wait for people to buy that NVME hat and mount WD Blacks on that :) READ BELOW
USB 2 is 480 Mb/s, not 480 MB/s. 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s, so the 500 MB/s from PCIe 2.0 x1 is quite a bit faster and is about the limit of what a SATA 3 interface could do. Also, sequential throughput isn't nearly as important as most people think. Random IO, which NVMe drives excel at, will make a far more noticeable impact on real world performance.
2 dual purpose DSI/CSU connectors (you can now use two displays or two cameras instead of one of each)
A PCIE FPC ribbon connector like the one used for DSI/CSI (you don't need a hat, just a ribbon) also the pi4 did not have any accessible PCIE lanes, only the cm4 did. Also the pi5 is capable of PCIE Gen3
More bandwidth for the usb3 connectors
more bandwidth for Wi-Fi (reports are it gets about double the bandwidth despite using the same Wi-Fi chip)
Fully SMD board, no through-hole components.
There's plenty of stuff I would have liked to see that didn't make it, but there definitely a lot more to it than an RTC and a power button. For $60 this is not a bad SBC at all.
I would have liked to see normal HDMI connectors, 2.5G Ethernet with PoE included, and higher RAM options.
More PCIe lanes would have been nice too but probably unlikely given the price point