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I probably shouldn’t poke fun- but I found it a little bit hilarious that we brought a Pi 4 to its knees on launch day in the Cambridge Pi Store just demoing a web application. The totally enclosed official case is a baffling idea and if memory serves it was a warm day to boot. Reminds me- I still haven’t dremelled holes in mine. The case, not the Pi.

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I think that says more about web tech than the Raspberry Pi.

Not really. The CPU generates 5W of heat which needs to be removed or it will throttle itself down. The way the default Raspberry Pi 4 chooses to remove heat is by interfacing the CPU directly with air inside a closed container. This does not work well.

As an aside, the reality is that the Raspberry Pi is not a particularly speedy computer even when not thermally throttled. It is close in non-graphics performance to x86 computers from the 2000s. Though using only 5W to do that is a huge improvement; that was the era when CPU heatsinks started getting so big they broke the CPU socket off the motherboard ;)

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