> Indeed. I think for most of us, seeing the pads there, but unpopulated, was a giant head-scratcher. The Pi 500 would've been more of a slam-dunk win with the slot in place, even if empty.

Hearing that coming out of a HAM radio enthusiast whose father is a broadcast technician is a little strange.

The most likely explanation is either RF interference; NVMe drives suck down enough power to substantially self-heat during big transfers and I bet that causes all sorts of interesting RF problems, especially given the Pi isn't sold in a case.

Or power sag issues. The Pis have always been infamous for their terrible power supply designs, which seem to be intentional to give resellers a way to bend people over. It's the old "every phone you buy has a different plug and you need $100 in AC and phone adapters" nonsense we used to have to deal with to pad retailer margins.

I remember Motorola designed one of the Nexus phones to require a proprietary fast-charge protocol so that Verizon, who had retail exclusivity for a bit, would get to bend people over for the stupidly expensive charger. Verizon also got Google to permanently fuse the bootloader so installing an alternative OS was impossible. On a nexus phone.