[malensek]

Even the previous-gen Pis would easily throttle under load without a heat sink (although usually installing a decent heat sink was enough to resolve the problem, assuming decent airflow). As the article notes, the heat was mainly from the SoC in the past. The Pi 4 is on a whole different level indeed.

I imagine the logic here is the same as with many other Pi accessories: if you need it, you'll buy it or get it as part of a bundle. In some cases throttling is not a huge issue. But we're a far cry from the simple plug-and-play Pis of the past... Another issue is power -- you can't simply run the newer Pis reliably off any old cell phone charger you have laying around.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Yeah, I'm kinda wondering just what the Pi is supposed to be at this point. Is it still an inexpensive low power device for teaching basic computer science? Because it seems like it's more for making Kodi boxes or the worlds most powerful LED blinkers.

[giobox]

I'd love to see some kind of reasonable data on the breakdown of how many Pis actually end up in education environments vs RetroPie/Kodi/PiHole/whatever else "service on an SD card image" turnkey solution type thing people use them for. At this point, my guess/gut feel is that education is an increasingly small part of the market for the Pi, yet appears to still be the main focus of the Pi Foundation.

I've always felt the educational focus was much more about the rose-tinted memories of parents who grew up in the homebrew computing generation in the UK. It feels much more a product for me in that regard than it does my kids. Ebon Upton et al are of this generation as well. British computer people of a certain age love to remember their ZX Spectrums etc.

[kingosticks]

There is some data at https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

[kevstev]

That's a great deck, I love the presentation and aesthetic.

[soneil]

Why does it need to be either/or? The way I look at it, every single hobbyist, retropie, dust collector, etc is just enabling the scale that allows them to deliver the hardware at the price point.

If 100% of Pi went into schools, the foundation would likely have dried up 4 years ago. We might not be the target market, but we enable it. We enable the development, the third-party/after-market, we provide the community. The foundation provide the "noble goal", and we provide the cashflow.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Because the two goals are somewhat incompatible. The more powerful they make the hardware to please one crowd the less they can meet the "low power", and to a lesser extent price (need a fan now, etc), goals.

[soneil]

I'm not sure low power was ever a goal. They've chosen USB as the power source, for whatever reason, and fairly consistently managed to just scrape (or just miss) the power budget. I mean, this is a device with no power management (other than temperature throttling), no sleep states, etc. If low power was the goal, they've managed to put out a successful product in spite of themselves.

It feels to me like they've only ever had two solid targets. One is the price-point, and they've shed everything that stood, and the other has been a rather solid attachment to backwards compatibility. (It often feels like the model A only exists because their original claim a $25 computer, and the A means they technically stuck it - despite it being one of their less popular models).

I think another commenter hit the nail on the head though - the whole thing feels like an emotional attachment to the way computing was learnt in bedrooms in the late 80s / early 90s - especially the success of the BBC micros (which I believe the model A & B are named after). Hooking up turtle bots, sticking wires straight into parallel ports, makes mail merges feel like a hollow shell of computing. I think that's what the Pi is trying to bring back (in a manner that makes the computer itself cheap enough to be disposable, rather than some expensive relic that you're afraid to mess with).

(Side ramble: I learnt computing (at school) in the UK in the era directly after this. As strange as this will likely sound to anyone who isn't British, the era when various supermarkets kindly volunteered to replace all our beebs with nice new Windows PCs. We went from wiring weird and wonderful things into parallel ports, to seeing computers as these expensive things that "we" had worked hard for. They went from being tools to being appliances. They weren't to me messed with, modified and tortured - they were to run Claris and Publisher, and later Netscape. My work now owes more to replacing burnt out serial controllers in Amigas, than to anything I learnt at "high school" level computing. We spent a decade or two insulating students from any nuts & bolts understanding, and modern environments are getting worse, not better. So I see Arduino, Raspberry Pi, as the antidote to being taught "computing" on an iPad.)

[kingosticks]

I can't agree with that conclusion. Where has the "low power" goal come from (as if 15W wasn't low power anyway). And as has been said already, you 100% do not need to actively cool a RPi 4 to teach kids to code with it!

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> I can't agree with that conclusion. Where has the "low power" goal come from

...ok, checking again I may have read that into the goals when it wasn't.

[marcosdumay]

The Pi4 is overpowered for a Kodi box.

That said, there is a huge number of applications for overpowered LED blinkers, and no lack of people to use them. And there is a great deal of educational value on having those boards available and easy to get.

Besides, it's becoming hard to find people without access to a machine where they can learn basic computer science. So this one niche is closing down, while the Pi is still unbeatable on hardware hacking.

[sjustinas]

Could you elaborate on why you think Pi 4 is "overpowered" for Kodi?

From what I've seen, there are still some kinks playing 4K HEVC videos. So hopefully, when software/firmware/etc. catches up, it should be "just powerful enough" for a Kodi box, all because of hardware decode.

Barely handling 4K does not scream "overpowered for a media center" to me.

[marcosdumay]

Ok, I didn't think about 4k videos, or software codecs.

[darkpuma]

> The Pi4 is overpowered for a Kodi box.

Even for software decoding of codecs or containers unsupported by the hardware acceleration? If that's true, I might have to get one.

[geerlingguy]

That’s just it, though. The official Pi power supply is adequate and good for powering the Pi in any condition, but the case is a far cry from adequate. At best, it just toasts everything inside more evenly, at worst it contributes to throttling because now the heat from every other part of the Pi forms a hot thermal blanket over the CPU.

I’m amazed they didn’t at least add a few passive ventilation holes or slots, somewhere. It gets crazy hot inside the case.

[devinjflick]

Yeah snagging the official case was a big let down imo. Having to modify it just so the board will operate for a generic use case was a sad moment for me. Glad to see your solution though, time to bust out my old hole saw kit!

Also excited to follow your Dramble project!

[isoprophlex]

I'm sad about the case too, it needs some extensive Dremel work to allow prolonged database queries or movie transcoding or basically anything I'd like to use it for

[vvanders]

Your phone will do this too, that's why sandwiching icepacks between your iPhone makes it do an iCloud backup faster.

Lots of vendors disable thermal limiting during benchmarks to get better numbers.

[kingosticks]

Part of me is wondering if that's why they disabled the 60C soft temperature limit for the pi 4...