> On 2019-06-26, at 2:05 AM, K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I must confess I am more than a little disappointed with this RPi 4. It is now promoted as "your tiny, dual display, desktop computer" (!).  If it is a "desktop computer" where are the SATA [1] or PCIe/M.2 [2] interfaces?

Connected to the USB-3 ports. Which works really well. Hell, mine work just fine connected to the USB-2 ports on my Pi3 - with USB-3 it will work even better. And there's that 'tiny' part - there simply isn't room for everything. I mean, they had to leave off the pink sparkle-pony this time.

> Instead, you get to drive 2 4K monitors. Why would one use such a board for a server or embed it in a moving robot?

You get two 4k display capability because that is what the videocore design provides. Can you imagine the whining if they had only connected up one port and the news of there being support for two had got out?

> 
> The foundation has strayed away from its original intent to design and build affordable development boards to promote hands on computing amongst students [1].

No they haven't. It costs the same. It weighs the same (plus/minus) and is the same size. It uses perhaps 1w more for around twice the performance per core. It has much faster i/o. What's not to like? And it's worth pointing out that the foundation is not the maker - Raspberry Pi Trading is.

> Its main appeal was its openness (global access), low-cost (i.e. every student could have one or more) and low-power (battery powered) and wireless connectivity (wifi/BT). With RPi 4, the power hogs in GPU and Ethernet have become worse.

Not so. And if you want the lower power use and can accept the lower performance, use a Pi Zero.

> 
> I find the emergence of boards with Micro Python or Lua out of the box is more inline with the original RPi mission. The gap between Arduinos and the old RPis are being filled in by these boards.

There are good uses for all of these options. Microcontrollers such as Arduino are useful for tiny stuff. Bigger devices like the ESP8266/32 move up the performance  curve and provide wifi - often cheaper than the Arduino boards. Pi are real computers; remember even a Pi Zero is a gigahertz 32bit cpu with hardware array floating point that would have crushed a high end workstation not so very long ago. The Pi4 is benchmarking well into base x86 desktop machine, i5 etc. And it's always good to remember that an x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.

Be happy to have so many options, so cheap, so flexible, so powerful, so available.


tim
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