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Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

This tugs all the heartstrings for me as it mimics the computers of the early 80s. My only criticism is that their use of micro-HDMI makes it very easy for children to wreck the machine. I've had this happen twice to me on RPi4s, and it's not a terribly pleasant experience.

Now all I want from them is a custom edition with the function keys in red, the rest in black, and the body in beige.

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I can't understand the reason why this port even was invented. The cables I have seen are few times bigger than the connector itself, so there is a lot of pressure and tension being applied on that tiny port. Only thing I can think of is saving some PCB space, but if they put more effort into arranging components, then I am sure full size port would fit nicely.

Yup, and if you look at Jeff Geerling's teardown photos, there were acres of extra PCB space and they easily could've switched back to regular HDMI for this unit.

It's a senseless design defect in what otherwise looks to be a splendid little unit.

If I end up with one of these, the first thing I'm gonna do is cut a little base-plate to glue it to, which extends behind the unit and has places to secure the HDMI cables (and maybe some other goodies as long as I'm at it), to prevent exactly the torque we all know happens.

[Unpopular opinion] having been spoiled by a working case† of USB-C, I wish there were 6 of those at the back instead of all the different plugs (save for Ethernet and GPIO)...

[Even more unpopular opinion] ... even if they were functionally different and marked explicitly as USB 3 x3, HDMI x2, power x1.

† I hear this is not everyone's case, but I just decided to buy a bunch of USB-C <-> whatever cables and stash the old cables in a drawer. The experience has been refreshing ever since, even emergency charging the laptop over 5W.

I would imagine that a USB-C controller, would add a fair bit to the price, maybe a later SOC will support it.

If I'm not mistaken the power-input is via USB-C: does that imply the existence of a USB-C controller already?

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 should have had one standard HDMI port and one micro HDMI port. That would have addressed the majority of users. Only the minority of users that want a second monitor on their RPi would need an adapter or special cable.

If only it had the traditional orange F-keys. Then it would be perfect!

references:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#/media/File:BBC_Micr...

or an actual ARM model:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#/media/File:A...

My memories prefer an Apple II theme. Either brown and beige or beige on off-white.

Fair enough in general, but the Raspberry Pi has an Acorn RISC Machine, of course. O:-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Acorn_RISC_Ma...

The ARM design was inspired by the 6502, which is shared by all of the most interesting 8-bit computers.

Fair enough in general. But specifically the first few generations of _ARM_ computers happened to have orange keys.

If you’re feeling nostalgic just tweet some BBC Basic code to @bbcmicrobot.

BBC Micro Bot - 1000 Tweets of Code https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/ "BBC Micro bot runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator."

Yeah, they should've gone with full-sized HDMI ports, since they have the room.

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