Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ review

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ from Raspberry Pi Ltd. launched on 15 November 2018. It uses the Broadcom BCM2837B0, a quad-core Cortex-A53 64-bit SoC running at 1.4 GHz, with 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. Owners praise its compact size and low price. They also complain about limited I/O and modest performance for heavier apps. Those two themes define the board: it suits a fixed, light job and not a general-purpose machine.

Four 64-bit cores at 1.4 GHz give it a reasonable processor for small tasks. Memory is the tighter limit. The specification lists 512MB of LPDDR2 and nothing else. With that ceiling, and with owners reporting modest performance for heavier apps, it suits one lightweight service or a dedicated display or camera project better than several services running together.

Owners also praise its low idle power draw. That fits an always-on role where the board spends most of its time waiting. Power comes in at 5V via micro USB, and the manufacturer recommends a 2.5A supply. You can instead feed 5V in through the GPIO header.

This is where the A+ gives up the most. There is no Ethernet port. Networking is wireless only, with 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE. Dual-band Wi-Fi is useful, but a box that must sit on a wired network is not possible with this board. That is the basis for the owner complaint about the missing wired connection.

There is a single USB 2.0 port. Keyboard, storage and any other USB device all compete for that one socket. Owners cite limited I/O as a complaint, and the port count is the reason.

Video and expansion are better served. The board has one full-size HDMI port, a DSI display port, a CSI camera port and a 4-pole stereo/composite port. It also has an extended 40-pin GPIO header. With the display and camera ports alongside it, that connector set points towards display or camera projects.

Storage is a micro SD card slot, used for both the operating system and data. The specification shows no onboard eMMC and no M.2 or NVMe connector. Everything lives on one card, and with a single USB 2.0 port there is little room to add anything else. It works for a small appliance-style build. It is a weak base for a project that needs a lot of storage or storage that is separate from the boot media.

The product brief states that production continues until at least January 2030. That is a production commitment and not a software support date, so it says how long the hardware will be made rather than how long updates will arrive.

The Model A+ is a narrow tool. Wireless-only networking, one USB 2.0 port, 512MB of RAM and micro SD storage all point towards small, single-purpose builds. Its low idle power draw, compact size and full set of display, camera and GPIO connectors suit that kind of work. If your plan depends on wired Ethernet, several USB devices or heavier applications, the specification and the owner complaints both point away from this board.