It’s Time to Bring (Real) Windows 10 to the Raspberry Pi (Premium)

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the first ultra-low-cost computer board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation to offer truly PC-like performance. It’s time to turn it into a real PC.

Yes, that means bringing Windows 10---real Windows 10---to the platform.

For years, the Raspberry Pi platform has come ever-closer to realizing this dream, but it’s always been constrained by one thing: An anemic amount of RAM. The first version, released in 2012, sported just 512 MB of RAM, while subsequent versions---including the Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015 and the Raspberry Pi 3, from 2016---had just 1 GB of RAM.

Microsoft hasn’t ignored the Pi. It released a free version of Windows 10 IoT Core for the Pi 3 in 2016. And .NET Core came to the platform in 2017. But neither of these things, nor these two things combined, represent or equal real Windows 10. They relegate the Pi board computer to being an enthusiast- and student-oriented teaching tool only.

That kind of thing is fine, of course. In fact, we can and should credit Raspberry Pi for reigniting a homebrew-style personal computing enthusiast movement the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s and early 1980s. But let’s be realistic: This movement is to personal computing as are vinyl records to music today; interesting on some level, and certainly nostalgic, but not a real push to make things the way they were before. The impact and reach are limited.

But putting real Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi could have far-reaching implications.

Doing so would give aspiring tinkerers and developers even more tools with which to work. More important, it could bring low-cost computing to the masses in a way that many expected never to happen. We’ve been told, so many times, that the billions of people coming up in third-world countries and developing markets would only use a smartphone as their sole computing device. Low-cost Pi-based PCs could change this.

And there is a real need here. The entire justification for low-cost PC-like solutions like Chromebooks is that, yes, most people will mostly use their phones, but every once in a while they will need a bigger screen, a real keyboard, and a pointing device in order to write and perform other tasks at length. Microsoft itself is responding to this reality with Lite OS and a presumed Chromebook challenger that will also run web and mobile apps.

A Raspberry Pi 4 running real Windows 10 could be the modern equivalent of Apple’s now laughably expensive Mac Mini, too, a BYODKM---Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, Mouse---solution that could undercut even the Chromebook. In fact, I think mobile is the right way to go here: There’s no reason that a Pi 4-based laptop couldn’t be cheaply built.

Consider that first Mac Mini, announced and released in 2005. It featured a 32-bit PowerPC G4 processor, 256 MB to 1 GB of RAM, a 40 GB or bigger Ultra-ATA hard drive, a CD-R/DVD combo drive, and decent connectivity: Fast Ethernet, DVI-out f...

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