These aren't mutually exclusive. I would vote for onboard NAND and an M.2 slot, and perhaps also a jumper or something to select which to boot from.

Normal thing might be to boot from on-board NAND but put real workloads on M.2 if present.

I have to also vote for crypto extensions. The Pi 4 is the only ARM64 I have ever seen that lacks AES and CLMUL. Makes it pretty lame for web serving, router/firewall/VPN gateway, etc.

Yep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever.

I would love to know why they chose to exclude this, it couldn’t make a big difference in price could it?

> Yep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever.

Good.

The last thing we need is profit mad crypto miners buying up every single Pi and we end up with shortages and insane prices just like with gaming GPUs.

He said node not miner. There is no way a Pi even with AES could possibly be worth running as a miner.

Running a node is about seeding the chain not mining, ofc.

Also a free market means people can do with the stuff they buy as they wish.

Whether I mine on it or stick it up my arse is just as valid as you gaming.

Doesn't change the fact I'm glad they excluded features that make it unfavourable to crypto people - for any reason - so that I can buy a pi for what it's intended for at a decent price instead of wondering if people are buying them to shove them up their arse.

Crypto extensions will never make the rpi even remotely cost competitive with even very old GPUs.

The main advantage will be general network ops.

Just because I don't want to shove a rasberry pi up my arse doesn't mean I'm closed minded.

> Whether I mine on it or stick it up my arse is just as valid as you gaming.

I now understand why the Pi Zero comes standard without the GPIO header.

Well, that's no fun.

Have you seen the new firefly rk3568 offering? They have lots of I/O including an M.2 slot and SATA port.

Never heard of firefly. I've looked into it and I might get one with 8GB RAM. Thanks.

Fair warning: the rk3568/rk3566 platform is very young. You may want to be sure that upstream uboot and Linux support the board before ordering. But the hardware looks promising.