comparison

A few months ago, I replaced my Core i9 MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 8GB of RAM for a day, and I made a video and a blog post about the experience.

Obviously there's a vast difference between a new Core i9 laptop with 32 GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU, and a 2 terabytes of fast storage and a tiny Raspberry Pi running ARM. So it wasn't a fair fight, but I could do a lot of things well enough, and every generation of Pi has gotten better.

A few weeks ago, someone from Mindshare Management asked me if I'd like to do the same test, but this time with an almost one-for-one replacement laptop: the new Kubuntu Focus M2.

Review video: Check out the video that goes along with this review:

Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi.

As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was introduced almost a decade ago. I have owned and used every generation of Raspberry Pi, in addition to most of the popular competitors. You can search my site for tons of articles on these experiences.

Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I stated:

One of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.

2018 Update: Please see the latest benchmarks in 2018 using a Raspberry Pi model 3 B+.

This post's benchmarks were performed on a Raspberry Pi 2; for all the latest benchmarks, on Raspberry Pi 3 or later revisions, check out the official Pi Dramble microSD card Benchmarks page.

In my experience, one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.

tl;dr: The Raspberry Pi Zero uses about the same amount of power as the A+, and at least 50% less power than any other Pi (B+, 2 B, 3 B).

On November 26, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced the Raspberry Pi Zero, a $5 USD computer that shares the same architecture as the original Raspberry Pi and A+/B+ models, with a slightly faster processor clock (1 Ghz), 512 MB of RAM, and sans many of the essential ports and connectors required for using the Pi as an out-of-the-box computer.

The Raspberry Pi Zero - quite a small Linux computer!

I thought it would be good for me to note some of the cultural differences I've noticed between Holland/Germany and the U.S. during my trip so far, if nothing else to try to understand the people in this part of Europe a little better: