Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

Hey Razor Burn,

Thank you so much for your comment! The whole situation with the WiFi module is pretty strange. I ordered the WiFi module from Ameridroid with the Rock 5B but I don’t know. I don’t think these exist yet. Why would I say that? Not even the YouTubers that get sent all this stuff for free have the WiFi module. Nobody has it as far as know. I’m experimenting with a E-key to M-key adapter that should come on the 3rd of January.

I am certain I will have the answer about whether this is a potential workaround long before we hear anything about the WiFi module coming available. We’re a month into launch and I still have yet to see even a picture that the module exists (nor are they giving any timeframes). It’s time to move on and start putting together a list of USB WiFi adapters and potentially even a E-keyed WiFi adapter solution so people can use their own E-keyed WiFi cards older ones of which are probably in the mainline Linux kernel.

That’s pretty unfortunate news about Raspberry Pi and RISC-V but to be honest with you I would have been a lot more surprised if Raspberry Pi is willing to change right now. They still have legions of people defending everything they do. There’s no doubt the organization is filled with people that think they can do literally no wrong. Raspberry Pi will need to be brought *low* before they are willing to make a single change that will benefit you.

This is why I argue so passionately with the fanboys. Raspberry Pi *NEEDS* to change. Now. We’re soooo far off the rails if they canceled the Pi 5 and are now doing *another* closed-hardware Pi 5 that isn’t even going to come out for *at least* another year! They aren’t protecting them by covering for their mistakes and excusing them not moving to open hardware. Raspberry Pi’s fate is being sealed right now and anyone who considers themselves or ever considered themselves a friend of the organization should be screaming to them “you guys are becoming obsolete, change with the times”! How many computers do these people think they are going to donate to the kids when the Raspberry Pi is obsolete closed-hardware trash and all of the competition is cheaper and more open?

It’s going to be too late when they finally figure it out. You’re right. 2024 is so far away. Can you imagine what kind of RISC-V devices are going to be out by 2024? I have the VisionFive 2 preordered and there’s all kinds of exciting things coming out. It’s looking to me like by the time Raspberry Pi even realizes they need to change and that they’re shipping closed-hardware in a world that has moved beyond that we will be *long* gone. I’m not sure people will even be *thinking* of Raspberry Pi seriously by the time they are ready to make serious changes.

Think about it. If the 2024 device is not going to be RISC-V when are they going to switch to open hardware? If they decide to do it after the Pi 5 then what are we looking at, 2026 maybe? That’s not how technology works. Nobody will even remember Raspberry Pi other than a has-been budget ARM option if they’re going to stick to the rapidly-being-abandoned ARM architecture. We will have completely moved beyond even the architecture they are using let alone past their closed-hardware practices.

If we add another generation and go to 2026 that is so far away that many younger new consumers might not even know what a Pi is anymore by then if they continue to flounder like this. They’ve already been losing younger consumers for this past year of nightmare availability as those consumers have no warm fuzzy feelings for the Pi (in fact probably quite the opposite after the harrowing experience of trying to buy one at retail).

We’ve basically had a year where the only people getting Pis are the people who overpay for them or people who spend weeks/months searching official resellers. What brand new Pi buyer is going to go through that? Not many which is why Orange Pi and competitors are booming. Why would you if you haven’t bought into the whole “Raspberry Pi supports open source” narrative?

I care right now. I’m very passionate about how bad Raspberry Pi is doing right now. I think that when the time comes though that they either meet their doom or decide they need to change I will have stopped caring a year or two prior to that. I won’t care by the time they actually try to start to change and you probably won’t either if the time frames we appear to be looking at are accurate here. I don’t think most consumers will care either. Things are changing that quickly and Raspberry Pi will not / is not.

I don’t think Raspberry Pi realizes how much the consumers have already turned on them. They don’t see it but a lot of these people who are buying the Orange Pi 5 and other boards have already been waiting a year to buy a Pi at retail. They’ve already been trying to click rpilocator and find it from the official sources. They’re sick of it. They’re sick of Raspberry Pi and they want to just buy something for a reasonable price and use it. I don’t see how they are going to outcheap RISC-V. That was really all they have going for them is the price but they can’t supply these and haven’t been able to for a year so even the pricing is total nonsense on the Pis. They’re already in terrible shape and my site is doing better than ever turning away from them (literally record numbers all week).

As someone who has covered Raspberry Pis for many years I wish I had been harder on them when it mattered. I wish I had complained about them a lot more 4-5 years ago when it would have made a difference (when me and only a handful of others even published anything about the Pi and most people didn’t trust it yet or thought it was a toy). They’re too big now. I don’t have any sway over them and I’m not sure anything will other than boards not selling. They’re also so self-righteous which is such a huge, huge obstacle to being able to change for anyone/anything (one many or even most of them won’t overcome).

Some people have been offended by how hard I am on Orange Pi. I will point out their underperforming PCIe interface and their mismatched tab colors on the USB ports mercilessly and relentlessly to the point where it has offended people. The reason I am the way I am is because of what Raspberry Pi did to me and my heart. I will *never* give a company a pass like Raspberry Pi again because I see that we have ruined/destroyed them. It’s like spoiling a child or something. I won’t do it again. We have to call them out when they make mistakes and I always will after what we’ve been through the past couple of years.

Orange Pi is also small enough that I *can* make a positive difference if enough of you guys see it in so much smaller of a market. They can hear us still at their size. I really hope to cause them some of the headaches I wish I had caused Raspberry Pi when they were small and not very many people were covering them like Orange Pi is now. My even greater hope is that on the Orange Pi 6 or some of the future generations of other competitor boards we see some of these mistakes start disappearing. That’s definitely what I want ultimately when I criticize these products / the companies.

This is a psychological problem at this point for both the remaining unwavering diehard fans of the Pi / the Pi Foundation itself and in the world of technology there is no time for them to go on a journey of self-discovery and remember who they are / what they believe in / etc. If they aren’t making the RISC-V Pi *right now* for 2024 it will be too late. 2024 is so far away still I’m not even sure the Pi 5 being RISC-V would have been soon enough but to be honest it probably would have been because they’re still the largest SBC manufacturer in the world.

Delaying another generation will definitely be too late. If we’re talking about 2026 that’s so far out that it’s scarcely even worth predicting other than it will look *nothing* like today and we know with RISC-V’s growth rate it will have a much larger presence.

Happy New Year to you as well!

Hey Razor Burn,

Thanks for being able to read it! That was a particularly long reply but you’re right that I definitely have some passion / fire related to this topic. You are exactly right though. If these existed they would have sent them to their YouTube partners and review partners. That’s just pure marketing / showing off so the fact that I have not been able to find a single video or even picture of the device tells me that it doesn’t exist yet. They didn’t even have prototypes or early ones to send to these partners to promote the product which is very unusual.

The YouTubers often get the special “maker” kits from these companies with a bunch of stupid customizations like their names printed on things, stuff like that. It’s ridiculous and I’m sure everyone has seen videos like that or the creators reviewing free product show all the little customizations they give them like little bags with their name on them and merch like that. This is something I could sign up and participate in but there’s a cost to doing so and it’s not a cost that most creators want to talk about. Suffice it to say it puts them in a position where it feels bad / difficult to criticize the product.

Seeed studios actually sent me the K1100 Grove sensor kit for free. This was one of the first times I allowed a company to send me product for free and I actually really struggled with it. I ended up not reviewing it. I just did a getting started guide because I felt… weird about reviewing it when I didn’t even purchase it and I 100% know the intention of sending me the $100 kit was to promote it. Even though I refused to review it I still hated how it made me feel writing about it. There’s an implicit psychological need that if somebody gives you something you feel like you need to reciprocate. Scammers use this at airports when they go around giving out flowers / whatever. If they shove something in your hand they are exploiting that human psychological need to reciprocate (which is why I have no problem telling them to take a hike guilt free when they try this crap).

Order history
Order Payment Fulfillment Total
AD654XX - 25 Dec, 2022 Paid Unfulfilled $235.83 USD
AD622XX - 29 Oct, 2022 Paid Unfulfilled $108.39 USD
AD591XX - 28 Sep, 2022 Paid Unfulfilled $48.12 USD

The first one from September 28th is the Radxa Zero. The second one is the VisionFive 2. The third one is the Rock 5B. Hurry up Ameridroid!

I honestly think my Ameridroid order for the Rock 5B is stuck even though I didn’t order a preordered one. Why? Because I was stupid enough to order the WiFi module and it doesn’t exist. It’s going to delay my order for weeks if not months and I’ll probably contact Ameridroid and cancel the nonexistent WiFi adapter so they will send me the board. They aren’t going to ship them separately because I only paid for shipping once.

I agree with you on the Pi alternatives 100%. If we’re comparing it to Raspberry Pi 2 years ago. You can’t buy the Pi at their listed prices. It’s just total nonsense. These are $100+ devices realistically. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2w has been over $100 on Amazon since day 1 and still is. Are they really better than their competition when they cost $100? No. The Orange Pi 5 is a better single board computer for $90 than the Raspberry Pi is at $100+. Those are really old quad-core boards using CPUs that were released in like 2018. My first quad-core Pi 4 cost me $35. My second 8GB one cost me like $160 because of Pi inflation and no availability.

Is putting $100 toward a Pi Zero 2W or a Pi 4 even comparable to an 8-core Orange Pi 5? No, actually. It’s not comparable in performance, value, anything. I would say that’s a terrible decision. The Orange Pi 5 wins that fight against every Pi that is out. I bought the Pi 4 in 2018 for like, goodness what even was it, $35? That world is *gone*. Long gone.

If Raspberry Pi was the way they were and selling these for $35 and undercutting and stomping the competition I would agree they are better. I would have agreed with this 2 years ago. I see the Pis as $100+ boards now (with no availability on top of that) and they are very poor indeed for $100+ boards. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare them to the Raspberry Pi of 2 years ago. The competition is cheaper and faster for less than $100. The Pi was only good because it was cheap. Dirt cheap. And easily available. It’s none of those things now and hasn’t been for a couple of years now. (5 year old technology with literally zero changes in that time yet the price tripled/quadrupled in reality, yum).

They haven’t even gone past 4 cores yet on any of their devices. All of the competition has been past 4 cores for several generations now. The flagship Pi, the Pi 4, was released 4 years ago and we are looking at 2024 for a possible successor. The situation is only going to be that much uglier when they released another closed-hardware Pi (unless they change course, it’s not too late but I’m not expecting it).

I think Orange Pi and Radxa still have a lot of work to do. I’m not really defending them having inaccurate/poor documentation or some of the mistakes they make. I want them to fix those mistakes and if they do I don’t even think many people will mourn the Pi. Right now nobody is perfect. Nobody is the saint. They’re all making terrible mistakes. Raspberry Pi is just making worse mistakes than the competition right now (and they are the ones that have everything to lose frankly).

Thanks for your detailed reply as well!

Hey Razor Burn,

Absolutely, you make some great points about the products and reviewing them. I think you’re right that there is a right way to do this without having it negatively influence your coverage. I think the other issue is a lot of reviewers get out of touch. I ran across this when reviewing the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. Yeah, it’s a great board if you get sent one for review and don’t have to buy it like regular people. I went through the whole real experience of trying to buy it like everyone else and this really helped me completely pivot on the site away from Raspberry Pi to be honest. Seeing my traffic tanking helped too. It personally hurt me financially that the Pi became so unavailable until I started doing content for boards that made sense to buy.

It’s great that the board is so good if you preordered it for $15 or got sent it for free but that is a $100 board for everyone else essentially. Very few creators / reviewers caught this (and frankly many of them are still afraid to talk about it now, you saw the push back I get from the most mild criticisms of them or even Orange Pi sometimes and it’s only going to be worse on YouTube/reddit/etc.).

It was not difficult for me either because I’d already been covering the Pi shortage (which actually helped save my traffic for a period of a couple of months because then I was getting traffic from everyone mad they couldn’t buy it and trying to find alternative places to look). I had not had to buy one for a while though (since the CM4) simply because there haven’t been any. I couldn’t believe how bad it had got. I thought I knew since I was covering the shortage and all of the news but until I went to buy one I did not understand the pain. I would not have even tried to buy that board if I didn’t want to review it.

It keeps me grounded / in touch to just buy the products and wait in the regular lines. These are all challenges that can be overcome and there are big YouTubers / creators that do this. I believe the only ones that do though are the ones that realize/understand this and actively fight against it / try to keep it in mind. If it’s just an ordinary person that blows up on YouTube they are going to fall right into those traps (and it’s a huge problem across the board, not just with SBC reviews). It’s not because they aren’t smart either. The whole industry is set up this way precisely because most people *will* play ball and go with the incentives.

The manufacturers are really smart. They don’t just send people stuff for free. Most people understand that they want to get the coverage / promotion and free advertising but it’s more than that. When you start working with reps for those companies they are *really nice*. I really like the rep I worked with from Seeed studios for the K1100. They’re really knowledgeable about the products and they’re great at what they do. It does influence your coverage and it takes a lot of self awareness to even realize it (which is why I think the only creators who don’t fall into those traps are the ones who actively fight against it and have that self awareness). They literally call you a “creator” and you are treated as a special higher class of person and if you aren’t careful you’ll start to believe you really are a special higher class of person.

You start to develop a relationship with these companies even just coordinating getting them to send you free products. For that to happen I now have a personal Twitter contact from Seeed. They talk about what they know about your site/channel and it’s flattering. You start to like them and think of yourself as having connections with these companies and it’s really just human nature as you get to know people that you’re not going to want to absolutely savage their products and you might even give them the benefit of the doubt when you shouldn’t. There’s nothing like them telling me what I should write. Not even a hint of it. I’m saying that doesn’t need to be there though before these interactions start changing your perception of the company and their products. It does for sure.

Now keep in mind that I’m tiny and we are only talking about <$150 gear they sent me. If you have 100K+ YouTube subscribers you will get a *lot* more attention and a *lot* more gear showered at you than anyone would ever offer my blog. Even just the taste I got of it though it's like, "oh yeah, this is nice, that's going to have an impact on how people feel / cover it and most of them won't even see it and of the few who do even fewer will be able to admit it to themselves". My college degree is in Psychology though and I was a social worker for 8 years long ago in another life. I think about why people do what they do and what impacts their behavior a lot more than regular people because it used to be my job. It didn't take a psychology degree though to immediately realize that nobody getting a taste of the special treatment / inside connections / free product is going to want to give it up easily though and certainly isn't going to be doing deep introspection about the subtle influences it is having on their coverage. That doesn't mean that nobody will overcome it though. The incentives / disincentives are clear though so unless they have some kind of other code most people are going to go with the incentives/disincentives and form these relationships with the companies and get the free gear. My review was one of the only dissenting ones out there and it probably still is. I can see why too. If you didn't have to buy that board (or even if you preordered it and got it for $15) it's a completely different experience (but it's a privileged one not representative of what it's like for any normal person). I would have wrote the exact same review they did if I didn't have to buy it and face the horrible market conditions and supply of the Pi Zero 2W release. The only way you see how botched of a release it was for regular users is to buy it like a regular user and they didn't. They thought they were reviewing a $15 board but it's still $100 on Amazon to this day (and has been since release if you didn't preorder it or create a bot to constantly scan the authorized resellers for available stock and immediately purchase it). That's very interesting point about Radxa using a E-key adapter. You're completely right! I didn't realize this before (since I haven't received mine yet) but the Rock 5B has *two* M.2 ports. The storage one is on the bottom of the board and the M.2 E-key is on the top. You are absolutely right. What a brilliant move by Radxa. There is also a picture of the Radxa E-key adapter on Ameridroid’s site here.

Thanks for pointing this out. I’m much less worried about my Rock 5B order being held up from the WiFi adapter than I was in my previous post. This is not the same situation as the Orange Pi 5’s where it needs to fit into a different keyed M.2 port. You’re absolutely right in your observations. I kind of feel silly for ordering the M.2 E-keyed WiFi adapter now because I have a bunch of those already but at least this is the intended one for the board and it will be useful to review the official one and tell people how it performs.

I have seen the Radxa Zero 2 on the Wiki but never saw anywhere to buy it. I think my mistake I made ordering the Radxa Zero is I got one with a eMMC (and these didn’t seem to be ready as soon as the ones without it). I’m starting to see these pop up on Amazon though now so they must be starting to ship out. I’m guessing Ameridroid will probably ship a lot of my gear within the next couple of weeks here as I’m also seeing the VisionFive 2 pop up for preorder on Amazon with a delivery of Jan 26th-Feb 16th.

That means I expect to be seeing my gear from Ameridroid at that time as they are an official reseller for a lot of these companies (including Radxa, one of the few official resellers and the only one in NA). The issues going on in China are almost certainly impacting it as you’re suggesting (there’s crazy COVID stuff too on top of all the holidays and the Chinese New Year etc.). If it’s going to be too much slower than I could have bought it on Amazon that would be annoying but Ameridroid has served me pretty well in the past on other boards like ODROID.

I’m so glad you enjoyed the K1100! I actually really enjoyed the kit. I am going to build more complicated sensor builds with it for sure. One of my new years resolutions is to use my Creality Ender 3 3D printer I’ve had for a couple of years that I haven’t done very many prints on. I need something like this to house the sensors with either something like the K1100. Seeed also sent me some microcontrollers like their XAIO series that can also be used to control the sensors. They sent me a couple different ones (RP2040, ESP32C3). I am going to move forward with these type of sensors though for sure for my home sensor build. I’d like to have a whole bunch of sensors on my home and a system to control them all essentially like I talked about in that article.

You’re right that we’re blessed for sure on the selection of boards. We’re getting some really compelling offerings. I’ve been really impressed with the Libre Computers boards like the “Le Potato” is on Amazon for $35 and only $30 for the 1GB version. I’m glad you enjoyed the coverage, thanks again and take care!