[cyanoacry]

> There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan.

I have to nitpick at this a little bit as a professional EE who works in high-reliability electronics. Wearout rates absolutely do depend on temperature (and thus heat), and thus the chips used here will have a shorter lifetime than those with active cooling. Now, whether that lifetime will be long enough for the common user is another question (maybe it's 1 million hours of life that get reduced to 100,000 hours, so not normally noticable).

[pslam]

Yes, wearout rate definitely depends on temperature, but without reference to any actual data, this is what I mean by "no evidence".

Is it reducing 10 year lifespan to 9 years? 9.99 years? 5 years? Was it 50 year lifespan? It's pointless conjecture.

[tkiley]

If the pi is designed to throttle at a temperature where its lifespan is reduced from 50 to 49 years, then it is throttling at a gratuitously low temperature that affects quite a few use cases.

On the other hand, if it is designed to throttle at a temperature that materially reduces the lifespan, then it needs a fan to preserve its lifespan.

Either way, the hardware is starkly suboptimal for a pretty large set of advertised use cases until you add a fan.

[abainbridge]

> If the pi is designed to throttle at a temperature where its lifespan is reduced from 50 to 49 years, then it is throttling at a gratuitously low temperature that affects quite a few use cases.

That's another claim that needs evidence. It seems possible to me that the thermal throttling is designed to prevent logic errors.

[kingosticks]

It's way, way more likely this is the reason than anything to do with lifespan.