The story on the new Raspberry Pi 5 | Hacker News Reader

The story on the new Raspberry Pi 5

raspberrypi.com

Finally, a power button! Talk about burying the lede. That's a big improvement for most casual users. Yes, you've been able to use a GPIO pin, a momentary switch, and a special daemon, but this works out of the box.

I just wanted a real 5V or 12V power jack, USB ports are terrible for delivering power to microcontrollers.

>We don’t do that because it’s costly in silicon, and it’s costly in wasted energy, which just ends up heating the board up. We’ve done the more Raspberry Pi thing, which is make a supply that can drive a five-amp load at five volts, which isn’t a standard PD mode, but you can negotiate it.

Why is that the more raspberry pi thing? I think it's silly. Sure, the board would heat up more but 5v 5a is just weird. You might as well not even have usb-c then and just use a barrel jack. You can override it and hope it works out, like they promise it probably will, but that's janky. using 5v just moves the losses to the cable instead of the buck regulator.

One of the big constraints on the Pi is thermal. The more heat yout power system puts intobthe board, the less you can afford to have your processor.

If you are going to add a heatsink and active cooling, this is probably not an issue. But if a significant portion of your users will not do that, then thermal improvements translate directly to performance improvements.

It's the more rasperry pi "thing" because it's simpler, cheaper and more accessible. You don't want to use a barrel jack because it's too easy to plug in the an adapter with the wrong voltage or polarity and it's not as ubiquitous as USB power supplies.

I don't like this much. Long crappy cheap cables won't work reliably. It's higher idle draw than some boards.

It really seems like it's trying to be a desktop replacement rather than a Pi.

I'm still upset that they threw away the original mission and the targeted userbase during the shortage. Makes all this talk about "the user" rather distasteful. The whole point was to make computers available to the underserved and then they went and threw away the underserved to serve their business buddies.

Trust is hard to build and easy to throw away.

They decided to keep the trust of businesses (including small/maker businesses) built on Pi at the expense of losing the trust of regular users and hobbyists.

Financial incentives seem to win at the end of the day.

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