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That's not the primary mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, yes things change overtime but I think it would be a major mistake to make the Raspberry Pi into a product in a classical way ( even if a large chunk of their success is coming from "the market" )

In current market conditions what you want would cost at the very least $100 and would require active cooling some of the workloads. The question is: would you buy it in those conditions? Most people don't and worse than that, the Raspberry folks would "lose focus in their mission" and the "product" would be just another one in a sea of clones.



> another one in a sea of clones

Is there a clone which can browse modern heavyweight web (like YouTube) without tears, runs the original Raspberry Pi OS (not the x86 clone), has the same (or bigger) set of GPIO pins and supports Raspberry PI hats? More IO would also be great to have. I don't mind if it costs some hundreds dollars. I'd love to have passive cooling though. And it has to be approximately the same size, MiniITX won't fit.


With all those requirements, I don't think so.

The problem with the "clones" is they are more or less the same but have one or two components as their strong point, one has a beefier CPU, the other has more IO, one has an "AI engine", etc but when it comes to smooth performance for the "normal" end-user, ie. run a bunch of tabs with "modern" sites in a smooth way every time you'll need to enter x86 territory. Then this whole affordable SBC tinker thing doesn't make sense because these are 2 different worlds.

I know because I've been obsessing for a sub ~$70 SBC that supports a bunch of SATA disks ( natively, no USB trickery ) for a decade.

Up until Apple's M1, desktop ARM was always an "almost there" experience at best and most were a terrible experience. ( Software is a big part in this too )

In the next few year I think things will change for the better.




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