Eben Upton Explains the Raspberry Pi Model A+'s Redesign

M-Saunders writes It's cheaper, it's smaller, and it's curvier: the new Raspberry Pi Model A+ is quite a change from its predecessor. But with Model Bs selling more in a month than Model As have done in the lifetime of the Pi, what's the point in releasing a new model? Eben Upton, a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, explains all. "It gives people a really low-cost way to come and play with Linux and it gives people a low-cost way to get a Raspberry Pi. We still think most people are still going to buy B+s, but it gives people a way to come and join in for the cost of 4 Starbucks coffees."

Comments

More RAM is easy for A/A+, Faster is Hard

[billstewart]

The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)

But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.