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Comment by graycrow | Hacker News Reader

My biggest disappointment is that they did not put enough effort into designing a PCB except to "unfold" the existing RPI4 one. The biggest drawback is the micro-HDMI ports instead of the full size one. Even with space constrains a lot of people would prefer one full-size HDMI port instead of 2 micro. My other wishes are compute module, M2 socket and RTC on the board, but obliously driving cost down prevented this.

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There's only two things I dislike on the Pi 4 today really.

No options for fast internal storage, and that tiny HDMI port. Given Pi 4 has reasonable CPU and up to 8GB of RAM, the former is a shame. The full size HDMI port on Pi 3 was compatible with cables virtually everyone already owned.

A model in the range with 32 or 64gb fast storage on board would be great - The Pi is useless for many without purchasing an additional SD card for a boot volume anyway!

IIRC, The internal storage thing is a limitation of the system-on-chip they use. They only have access to a single pci lane, so they decided it's better for the form factor and education use-case to connect the lane to a hardwired pair of usb3 ports than a potentially more flexible pci-e port, which would allow nvme storage.

FWIW, the new compute module does have built-in access to the pci lane, which gives you the option to use nvme in addition to the onboard flash storage.

they've got compute modules with emmc, and and a board you can slap them on, that has full sized HDMI.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...

costs more, and takes up more space, but it includes a whole bunch of other goodness.

the compute module with 8gb of ram and 32gb of emmc isn't available in small quantities yet, but that should happen sooner or later.

Am I the only one who prefers micro HDMI? I've heard good arguments to suggest it isn't very robust in the hands of kids... but from my own perspective all my micro HDMI cables are much thinner than my full-sized HDMI ones and they... just sit better. That said I've got an M.2 PCIe 2230SSD hanging out of the USB port on an adapter, so any grace or elegance is gone from my setup.

Edit: mini to micro (mini on the Pi Zero, micro on Pi 4/Pi 400)

It would be great if a mini-HDMI to HDMI breakout board was available for purchase. It seems some people are working on it (https://easyeda.com/eddperks/RasPi4-HDMI-Breakout)

Isn't such an adapter commonly available in cable form? Full size HDMI on one end, smaller one on the other. Probably sold at a lot of electronics stores.

(One is included in the box here)

Yes, cable adapters are plentiful. There are also dongles, but the two ports are too close together to fit dongles in both ports (at least in the Raspberry Pi 4B).

You can just buy HDMI to HDMI mini cables from Monoprice for cheap and no space issues.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=3645

The real question for windows on arm users is does the pci bridge and usb controllers still have that 3GB ram ceiling issue?

It’s so lame having 5gb of ram unused in a 64bit system.

Windows on RPi has a workaround for that via a filter driver for earlier BCM2711 steppings.

Newer BCM2711 steppings as shipped in CM4 and RPi 400 do not have the issue. (and that newer stepping could very well have reached regular RPi4s too)

I'm genuinely curious why you would want to run Windows on an RPi when there's good Linux support. Why pick a proprietary OS that costs money when you have a free and open source alternative with all the drivers and lots of code examples using the GPIO ports, etc? Genuinely curious as to what your motives are.

I'm not the parent poster but Windows-on-Pi seems like it would be very useful (in terms of affordability) for testing purposes.

Either a whole swarm of them for automated testing, or perhaps just keeping one around to make sure your stuff works on Windows outside of a VM, etc.

What is there to test on Windows ARM?

lack of full hdmi port is a nogo for me, maybe rpi 500 will have them

Get a short mini-hdmi to full-hdmi, and epoxy it to the rpi400.

It's a slight inconvenience, but hardly a big deal. The 400 comes with a free adapter, and if you want a cleaner solution, here's a cable for 7 bucks delivered: https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Wenter-Action-Camera-Supporte...

Honestly, it sounds like you're just looking for an excuse to not like the 400. Especially since others have said that it comes with an adapter.

It's like saying you won't buy one because it looks too much like a Commodore 64.

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