For all of our drooling at the latest and greatest advancements in technology, few computers have been as celebrated as the Raspberry Pi. From its release in 2012 at a still scarcely believable $35, the little computer has encouraged a generation of creatives to turn it into whatever takes their fancy. Hopefully the new model will do nothing to compromise that.
No case, little power, no Ethernet if you bought the really cheap one. And yet this remarkable little device has been turned into a camera, a gaming machine, a robot, the best ad blocker money can buy, the cheapest webserver you can buy that won’t eat its savings in power costs in a month. Really, anything that the inspired engineer can think of doing can be done on a Pi for very little cost. Assuming that they want to keep it small scale or are also planning on how to migrate it into something a bit more powerful once past proof of concept.
So what do we make out of this, the Pi 5? Well, it’s certainly going to be more powerful, ditching the Cortex A72 cores of its predecessor in favor of newer, more powerful, more efficient A76 ones. The 1 and 2 GB RAM options are gone. 4096 or 8192 MB will be your playground for now to enjoy all of the standard refinements of a Pi, from the dual-band Wi-Fi to the ever-hackable 40 GPIO pins.
But all of this comes at a cost. Two actually. Gone is the $35 price point. Instead, you have to fork out $60 for the 4GB version and $80 for the 8GB. $5 more than a similarly equipped Pi 4. Ordinarily this would be very unfortunate for everyone wanting a Pi, but seeing as how we’re coming from a long period of being forced to overpay for them, it’s not really the dealbreaker that it could be. A more amusing cost is power consumption. Raspberri Pi Themselves recommend you don’t attempt to run your new Pi out of the Power supply of a model 4. Instead, effort should be put towards their new 27W USB-C power supply.
And honestly, not even that should be a deterrent. Amusingly enough, one of the books I recently read was Tim Dantons The Computers that Made Britain, a Raspberry Pi Press book showcasing milestone devices in the history of computers in the UK. From the expensive to the incredibly basic ones, they all shared in a collective sense of wonderment at what was possible to create using these computers. Even the ones that were soldiering on Zilog Z80s long after that chip was left in the dust by its more ambitious partners.
And they were all considerably more expensive than a Pi 5. The kids will be alright.
