^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

A refresh for a Pi Zero with real sleep. lower power consumption and moving away from GPIO would be awesome. Stuff like a dedicated i2c connector, PoE support and display over USB-C.

M5Stack and other esp32 based ecosystems rule the world for MCU so the Zero just need to be linux SOC with all the fancy bells and whistles with good driver support

They'll do whatever they do.

Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.

I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.

My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).

I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.

I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.

So I'm learning towards 512MB.

But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)

Ideally each RPi generation should keep the same price (or lower now that it's gotten so high) but with better performance. If they can't do that they just shouldn't create a new generation.

We need a 5 lite. The specs of the 5 without the massive power draw and heat generation

> Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.

Yes, that would be kind of a dream device, perhaps also if it could suspend the os when asleep so it doesn't have to boot every time but I guess that might the standard way of doing it.

I'd be interested in seeing them partner with some of the other interesting and open-ish players, like Pine64 or Radxa, to push for a more standardised, unified SBC landscape.

But that's not as good for PR as "bigger, faster, better" even if that comes with the problems you mentioned.

I wonder how they are positioned now in the market.

During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.

Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..

Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.

Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.

I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.

Is there some serious astroturfing going on with the N100/N150, or am I just jaded?

I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!) that lost Windows support very quickly after launch, and has no GPU drivers for any other OS.

Instead of being fooled 4 times in a row, I looked into using an N150 for a NAS, but this time I held off a bit until after launch so I could research it first.

Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. I guess there are some chicken bits for the OS developers to set if the kernel can stay up long enough after boot without a panic.

Why would anyone buy this for a NAS / embedded use case?

A Raspberry Pi with sleep and hibernation is like asking Valve to make Half Life 3. They just can't. It doesn't compute.

The entire raspi foundation is a marketing department. Raspi products is making zero sense ever since the Pi 2.

> encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150.

It’s nerdier to say you built your homelab on a Raspi, and that’s what keeps the foundation afloat.