Thoughts on the newly announced Raspberry Pi 5

raspberry pi 5

Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features (ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:

  • It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
  • However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
  • Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
  • Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.

If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5: