What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have "lost its way".
I'd argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.
Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.
But nowadays pis are in the no man's land between. They're priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.
I'm not sure, how that's supposed to be sustainable.
That's definitely true but pretty much you can buy some x64 mini PC for a very similar price, and also similar power consumption that is going to be more versatile and powerful. For example you can run some VMs etc. on top of it. The only benefit of the Rpi nowadags is only their form factor.
Yeah the support is what pulls me to them but anymore unless I need the form factor of the pi it's hard to justify them. Like the only place I see a hobbyist use for the Pi is 3d printers. Outside of that everything else seems like a small form factor desktop is better.
Geerling also demonstrated that the 2GB Pi 5 comes with a couple of unexpected benefits that Upton didn't mention in his announcement—that the 2GB Pi 5 runs a little cooler and uses a little less power than the 4GB and 8GB editions. The 2GB Pi used just 2.4 W or power at idle and 8.9 W during a CPU stress test, compared to 3.3 W and 9.8 W in the 4GB version. The SoC of the 2GB Pi measured 30° Celsius at idle and 59° under load, compared to 32° and 63° for the 2GB version. Those are all small but significant differences, given that nothing has changed other than the SoC.
As to the exact functionality that was removed from the chip for the 2GB version of the Pi, the company hasn't gotten specific. But Geerling speculates that it's mostly related to functionality that's being handled by the custom RP1 I/O chip—RP1 handles the Ethernet and USB controllers, display interfaces, and GPIO, among other things.
It's curious that things went this way. Broadcom originally made these chips for the cheapass end of the tablet market, but I thought RPi was gobbling up the entire supply. Why put in those features in the first place when the Pi5 wasn't going to use them?
The Pi 5 doesn't require 5v 5amp. You just get limited power on downstream USB devices (like max 1 or 0.5 amp, not really that bad). It will run just fine on 3 amp PSU.