There's a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn't worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.

I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there's half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?

The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they're unicorns, you can't find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they're still slightly different enough that they don't work (I've tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good fucking luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?

Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven't tried yet, but I'm planning to.

In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren't exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases... so I'm looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.

Now everyone is talking shit about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3's have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What's decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn't matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm all ears. I've googled till I'm blue in the face and I can't even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software...

The real exciting news is the possibility of the pi 4 dropping in price as it’s now outdated.

more like Raspberry Bye 5 (the stock will all be scalped)

I have no idea (yet) what I'll do when I buy one.

For all of us bitter people who couldn't get an RPi 3 let alone 4 for less than a fortune during the recent dark times...

We’d like to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.

So I will probably preorder one because why not.

Am I correct in saying this Pi5 will be the best chance at a very performant desktop PC? That seems very much where they were headed with all these designs.

I wonder if they can finally run on fully open source firmware.

Will it handle all features of Plex? Like streaming high def and using all plexamp features?

Are they still playing apologetics for the cops? Because if so, no thanks.

I wonder if the will make a Pi 500 the all in one form factor is so convenient when traveling

I think it was a mistake to remove hardware video encoding. Even the hw encoder for H264 1080p 30fps was better than no encoder. Apparently they think sw encoding can replace it..yeah.. the cpu is more powerful, but not that much more. I think intels N100 processors will be more competitive for applications involving video/webcam

Oh cool, been waiting for this announcement. Nice.