I've got to wonder, am I the only one that wishes these things came with PoE support out of the box without needing an addon? I can't even find a competitor that supports PoE without needing an extra PoE HAT.
Tbh, POE isn't a feature most people need. And it's quite expensive, takes up a lot of room, and generates quite a bit of heat.
You can get inline POE extractors that spit out 5v usb/jack or 12 jack. I use them quite a lot, and they are much cheaper than PoE hats
Yeah I just hate all the extra clutter the extractor adds. It's really nice to just run some cat 6 to a Pi and call it a day. If I could spend an extra $50 to get a Pi or Pi-like device that came with PoE built in I would in a heartbeat.
It's not free, but it's not really that hard either. You can even get fancy and use isolated power for some extra safety.
I'd like to see some more specialized versions of these boards. For instance one that trades the MIPI ports (which I have literally never found a use for) for PoE or some other feature that's more useful in a networking centric use case. In many cases I'd even be willing to give up a USB port for that.
Theres a bunch available in the US/Canadathis week (all week, for the first time in a very long time). Not available everywhere, but the major Pi distributors have pretty much all had some - all the pi 4 models, too.
The drought has been easing up for a while and has been nearly over in Europe for several months. It looks like it may just about be over in NA too.
If you're in other countries I guess maybe it's still pretty dry.
The 4 was impossible to find until, like, four months ago. I've been subscribed to six stock notification services for three years and only got my hands on a Pi 4 this year (and it's not even the model I wanted!). The pandemic was nuts, but things seem to have stabilised.
No actual PCIe or M.2 connector on the board, the M.2 hat won't be available at launch, and it appears to block the required(?) coolers from being fitted.
The problem is that the M.2 thing still is a HAT, and basically sits about 10mm above the main board, leaving no room for proper active or passive cooling - or at least making it very complicated to achieve. Putting the M.2 slot at the bottom of the main board would have been a good solution that would have avoided a lot of problems.
I think I've personally hit the point where PIs are like phones, there's nothing new that I actually need but a handful of things that looks handy. Never thought I'd be excited about (effectively) a bios battery.
It does and I used to briefly run a ZFS pool on a Pi 4 in 2019. I only abandoned it due to a nasty deadlock bug that I think got resolved sometime ago. Non-ECC RAM shouldn't be significantly worse than using say MDRAID or Btrfs with non-ECC RAM.
Just in time when I was reading about Home Assistant. Either I can get a couple of these to play with, or I just find an older Pi 4 for cheaper (and easier availability).