I have not pulled the trigger, yet. I’ve been watching the news and reviews, too, and while it looks good on paper I’m not yet convinced they’ve found the best compromise. True gigabit Ethernet on a dedicated bus is good, as is USB3, hardware video decoding and the availability of increased RAM. But the increased power consumption and elimination of the full-sized HDMI are negatives. And the continued reliance on SD cards for storage and boot make that now the weakest point of the board.
I have a small aluminum heatsink on my 3B+ already. As long as it doesn’t require a fan, that’s okay with me.
I agree with you in part. I have a couple tiny heatsinks on my 3B, but not my 3B+. Both are in official cases, and I try to take off the top when I run them (more important on the 3B than on the 3B+). But yeah, it seems to me that if passive cooling isn't doing enough, you probably should be considering a totally different form factor (and/or maybe you're trying to do too much and the Pi isn't the right tool).
And while I agree that the SD card has been a weak point, the SD card is a highly compact, low power draw, and neat solution. And the A1 rated cards are quite a bit better than prior types at things like random i/o speed. Obviously nothing will beat an SSD or HDD in that regard, but then you lose the elegance factor. I was going to say that if you had to have a fan and hook up SSD or HDD, then maybe the current form factor is something they should yield on ... something like the Mac Mini form factor might be more appropriate. But there are those who use Pi in embedded systems and the small form factor is valuable to them. To those of us who is it as an ersatz desktop PC, nothing of value would be lost if it increased in size from a deck of cards to a trade paperback book.
I'll concede too - I like USB boot, and in fact, have thumb drives that are clones of my microSD cards. Those don't add much clutter, of course. I've also experimented with attaching external HDD as storage and even booting from those (inconsistent results, even with powered drives).
For a long time they were insistent that they were as firm on the $35 price tag as anything in their design. But they have blinked on that a bit by offering the 2GB version at $45 surcharge and 4GB at $55. If they are really gunning for lower-end desktop performance, they may be wise to reconsider the form factor on their "top of the line" model. It's not meant to be a mobile solution ... and a desktop user (e.g., kid learning to code) doesn't need it to be tiny.* Allowing the next Pi to be the size of a trade paperback book or something similar might open up some design alternatives that could solve some of these issues with temperature and (reliable/fast/persistent) storage, while keeping the price low.
They are really pushing what can be accomplished at that price and in that form factor. They always have, but it seems that the current design is really bumping up against practical limits. The ad-crazy modern web makes it all the more difficult. That's a monster whose appetite for system resources is never sated. I suspect that in most cases, the need for a lot of the speed, increased RAM, and so forth is because of how difficult the browsing experience is otherwise. But the browser is a pretty indispensable piece of software, even for kids learning coding.
*An upgraded Pi Zero W/WH could serve the embedded market.]
