But the software for other SBCs is extremely bad, I've never heard of any Pi on release or after that has any software or hardware bugs.

Proprietary blobs aren't that bad with Broadcom...

I mentioned AMD64 SBC, that is AMD or Intel. CPU would be typically an Atom, Celeron.... Any mainstream Linux distro supports those. And hardware quality is far better.

Pis do have bugs. Most famously botched USB-C power delivery on initial Pi4. There are tons of minor bugs in Wifi, bluetooth, USB... Plus missing features, Pi5 does not support WPA3, no hardware codecs for encoding/decoding video...

Baseline RAM Pi are still magnitudes cheaper, its a moot/niche above 2GB for most makers. Pi doesn't have to cater to lite servers only...

Gotta admit that Pi foundation never cared about batteries, especially since it's common with makers, audio removal etc...

Pi4 2GB with power source, SD card, case, fan is like $100. You can have nice Atom MiniPC for that. Or old PC from ebay...

But these are used, cheap new Atom miniPC doesn't have GPIO, and brand new Atom SBCs with GPIO are more $$$ with the same SoC compared to miniPC since they aren't mass produced. A used Pi with sdcard/case/fan is much less than $40.

USB GPIO dongles are a cheap addon to any x86 PC, e.g. "Adafruit General Purpose USB to GPIO" at https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

It (the 5) has a hw HEVC decoder, just no encoder

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

RPi has its share of bugs. USB spec violations and busted WPA3 come to mind.

If you're thinking of the USB-C PD input being 5v/5A, that's not a spec violation, just a bit of an extreme use of the more recent version of the standard.

It would be nice if it were higher voltage/lower amperage, but it works at least with their own power adapter through a few clever tricks.

For WPA3, it is what it is... most SBCs have 'middling at best' built-in WiFi, and while the driver support can improve, I typically stick to external or M.2 PCIe WiFi chips if I need something more robust. (Hopefully a WiFi HAT will make its way to the market with Intel AX210 or something like that).

I actually meant this old USB issue:

https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/exploring-the-raspberry-pi-4...

Ah yes, that one was pretty silly. Partly due to not spreading out alpha test hardware wide enough to catch a more obvious bug like that. Also up there with 'don't take pictures of the Pi 2, the camera flash will reboot it' :)

The Pi 5's PCIe implementation has a lot of fixes—to the point where after only a few days of work, Coreforge over on GitHub has Minecraft rendering through the GPU (only at x1 speed so far).

The CM4 uses the silicon from Pi 4, which was never really a fully-baked PCIe implementation, so I'll forgive them a little there. But it opened up a huge number of possibilities that I think will be realized on Pi 5 (and hopefully a CM5 eventually).

And regarding power consumption / efficiency, don't forget about the usefulness of a full Linux computer running at less than a watt (like the Zero 2 W); or with the Pi 5 you can use the watchdog timer to boot and shut down now, going from idle at 2-3W to power off at 0.01W if you need a remote 'edge' device.

But the hardware and efficiency were never the primary drivers for Pi. It's the fact you can buy one (well, sometimes...) and use it. You don't have to spend a few hours getting the right OS, figuring out the right tools to flash it reading sparse forum-based documentation...

And even the Pi 4's PCIe is fine for some things. I have a CM4-based NAS that I put together using Axzez's Interceptor board (a big thank you, Jeff: I learned about it though one of your GitHub issues where you'd been cataloging CM4 carrier boards), and it's just fine for spinning-rust hard drives. It isn't maxing out their performance or anything, but it reads and writes fast enough for anything I need to do with it.

This is a weird subthread that smells like astroturfing.

Yeah, it's a little weird that it's a throwaway account. Astroturfing or not, it's IMO off-topic and an annoying distraction; flagged it out of existence.

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