There seem to be some design annoyances with the Pi 5, in my personal experience

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Overall the Pi 5 seems great, I have no doubt it will prove to be a fantastic SBC. I pre-ordered one and was fortunate enough to receive it today (I failed for a long time to get a Pi 4 so I wanted to avoid that this time around).

I purchased it with the official power supply, case, and heatsink/cooler, primarily to get an "official" experience.

The official case - In my opinion it's pretty poor quality for the price. It features a removable fan insert that needs to be removed if the integrated heatsink/cooler solution is used, so that is a good thing, however the overall case seems very "cheap". It barely clips together and does so with a very poor retention force, i.e. very easy to accentally just break the whole thing apart again.

The official heatsink/fan is surprisingly noisy - When at 100% duty cycle, the fan is loud enough to hear from the other side of my room, it's surprisingly noisy and somewhat annoying. Appreciated that it rarely needs to run at full speed but when it does I certainly know about it.

The lack of a spring-loaded MicroSD slot - This is probably a personal opinion, however the lack of a spring loaded MicroSD card slot combined with the official case makes it, at least for me, virtually impossible to remove the SD card without disassembling the case. The retention force of this push-in style socket is sufficient enough to prevent me from dragging the card out without applying a force that I am not comfortable doing. It still baffles me why the Pi series doesn't use the spring variant socket. My only guess is this is a cost saving measure, unfortunately unless I have a pair of very fine needle-nosed pliers at hand, I just can't get the card out.

Power consumption and need for active cooling - I appreciate that as SBCs get more powerful they inevitably consume more power, however it seems strange to me that a larger process node was selected for the SOC (16nm) which clearly results in a lot more heat generation and realistically the need for active cooling if you want to get the full potential of the chip. However, surely the use of a smaller process node would negate or balance out the cost of installing an active cooler, which isn't all that cheap. RK3588 for example is on an 8nm process node.

No M.2 NVME connector - Yes there is a MIPI style connector for PCIe but I personally think there really should have been a proper M.2 connector on the back by now. It's going to require a PCIe hat or some other solution to take advantage of that. I hope in the future we'll see a native connector on the board. Seeing as the cases have had to be redesigned again because the Ethernet port has moved (again), I would have personally taken the opportunity to add an M.2 at the same time so the new case designs can accommodate that extra vertical height requirement underneath the board. I now wouldn't be surprised if we'll see yet another case design in future if they elect to add an M.2 socket. Could have killed two birds with one stone basically.

Anyway, that's my useless blabber done with. Please don't hate me!!
submitted by /u/Zatie12
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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/c ... _with_the/