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by eropple 970 days ago
It really doesn't. Cheap phones have browsed the web just fine for a long time, now. Raspberry Pi makes some weird hardware choices and have been suffering from it for a while. The insistence on SD cards (other manufacturers support eMMC or m.2 or both, and while RPi5 does now this has been the case elsewhere for A While) is the biggest problem with overall perf, including browsers.

I would expect the boards with the RK3588 to still be more pleasant to use than an RPi5, but the RPi5, used with an m.2 drive, should be significantly better.
2 comments
Mordisquitos 970 days ago
Cheap phones don't browse 'the' web 'just' fine—they browse 'a phone-optimised responsive' web 'reasonably' fine.

A fair comparison of cheap phones and a Raspberry Pi would be browsing the web with the "Desktop site" feature enabled in the phone browser.

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eropple 970 days ago
I have a Moto G...something, at least five years old, sitting on my desk. It normally acts as a teleprompter. I opened up Chrome, turned on desktop site mode, and started browsing, and gotta be honest: it was fine. If nothing else, if absolutely nothing else, it could scroll a web page without stuttering, and a Raspberry Pi 4 has never been able to do that in any configuration I ever tested.
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Qwertious 970 days ago
How is MicroSD weird? A microSD card 1) is available at Officeworks etc, and 2) doesn't require soldering so imaging the OS can be done before your RasPi even arrives on your Windows/Mac computer.

In contrast eMMC is soldered onto the board, while the m.2 didn't even exist back in 2012 when the first RasPi launched.

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yjftsjthsd-h 970 days ago
It's not that SD cards don't have advantages, it's that they also have noted disadvantages in terms of speed and reliability, particularly when you factor in that people don't always buy the high end models.
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eropple 970 days ago
In a time when computer programs habitually assume fast storage, running your operating system and primary runtime on a microSD card is weird. Even "fast" microSD storage usually isn't unless you buy cards that cost as much as the SBC in the first place. If you want some perf in the SD form factor you go to the full-size card--that's one reason cameras still use them--but even there you encounter pretty hard limits, which is why higher-end cameras have also gone to SSD-over-USB-C and CFExpress Type B.

eMMC does not have to be soldered-on, either; the Orange Pi 5+ has a swappable eMMC module.

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bluGill 970 days ago
This is the pi5, not the pi1. Technology marches on. Maybe the SD made sense in 2012, but that doesn't mean it still makes sense in 2023.
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