The 3B+ was probably the high of the raspberry pi. It is still pretty much unrivaled in terms of idle power consumption and energy efficiency (or at least i have not seen any other SBC that got below 0.5 Watts on idle) on the consumer market.

But i have trouble investing further into them.

They do not post any update guides for newer Debian releases and basically only support new deployments.
It looks like they are abandoning their older products. vcgencmd for example is still broken on the 3B+. Since they "fixed" it for the 4B. See https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1224

[–] EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I agree that the 3B+ was the best Pi but for other reasons:

The Pi 3B+ had the perfect balance between performance and price with the performance being good enough at the time.
Design flaws at launch. Remember the Pi4 CC1 & CC2? POE getting pulled from the market?
Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.
They put big customers first and let everybody else starve during the shortage. This forced me to alternatives and I have to say they work just as good and cost less.
Jacking up retail prices: Even Intel x86 is now cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Pi5: 5V 5A USB-C??? There is now 45W USB-PD (@15V) that would be compatible with generic PSUs but they went proprietary with 5A@5V.

Was not even thinking about that. Implementing USB-PD is so easy these days. Basically just putting a chip there who handles the PD and then a step down(or whatever) converter which they already have anyway. (See ebay USB PD trigger for implementations)

That is so dump.

Talking about hardware flaws, i think they even fucked up the USB-C implementation on the PI 4. They put the resistor on the wrong pins or somthing. Dont remeber exactly.

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think operating at 5V input might be a technical constraint for them. Compatibility revisions for existing hardware are a lot more difficult if the input voltage is 9x higher. Addressing that isn't as easy as slapping a buck converter on the board.

Not saying requiring 5A was the right call, just that I can see reasons for not using USB-PD.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

We are not talking about 9 times higher. 3A at 9V would be enough.

I am currently looking in the Docs and it is really confusing. It states that the PI 5 has a PMIC on board but still saying it boots up only when the 5A is present... So not sure what is going on here.

And looking at the PD 3.1 standard it looks like 5V 5A is actually in the spec in the new Version...

Will have to get my hands on the new PD 3.1 spec.

[–] EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

They used 1 resistor for CC1 and CC2. The fix and correct implementation was to use one resistor per CC-line (two in total).

[–] dai@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Picked up a laptop with a busted screen $30 cheaper than the RPI 5. 1135G7, 8gb upgradable ram, m.2 storage, wifi, bluetooth and a battery.

Raspberry pis' were great early on, but their appeal has quickly diminished in my eyes considering used hardware options that are available now.

Size would be the one redeeming quality of a raspberry pi for me, my headless laptop is thin but takes up substantially more space.