The boards are of course bigger, which I guess will be a non-starter for many. They'll also require active cooling unless you downclock them considerably. They often also require more power, although many mainboards can be configured down two a few watts of power consumption, depending on what peripherals and speed you need.
Yeah, it's more work than just getting a Pi, but given the current prices, it makes sense for me.
If you use the raspberry pi for homeservers or general compute (which I did/do sometimes) then the value proposition is quite poor regardless of pre AI prices unless you have very strict power requirements (in which case it probably fits the above use case already). The comparison with NUCs or mini PCs or laptop boards feels like it's a wrong comparison.
The chips used in PIs are repurposed Broadcom SOCs that have inferior bus speeds compared to a general purpose processor from intel or amd, even few generations old. For any general purpose computing these chips will always be slower. its like comparing apples and oranges. I never really understood why people did that.
At first it was a blessing that the Raspberry Pi gained popularity as a general purpose computer, not just for education and embedded applications. The additional demand and popularity brought more money and development attention to the ecosystem.
At some point, which I could never really put my finger on, this general purpose computer popularity grew so large that the embedded systems and educational aspects of Raspberry Pi seemed almost forgotten by the mainstream users. At a local in-person meetup group it was a running theme for people to brag about how many Raspberry Pis they owned for different purposes and to boast about using them for applications where they didn’t really fit. In person I’ve heard more about Raspberry Pi NAS systems (where people are always disappointed with the performance and the price of forcing a Pi into this role) or Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters (which mostly sat idle and could have been replaced by a single PC with more RAM).
This reached such a critical mass that it almost seemed like the mainstream discussion forgot the original purpose of the Pi and thought it was literally just another computer, but small. Most people who tried to use it for this purpose were left slightly frustrated by how it didn’t perform like they wanted a computer to perform.
So now every discussion about Raspberry Pi attracts comments about how nobody should buy a Pi when you can buy a NUC or laptop or some other used piece of hardware and it’s so much “better”. This is the right advice for a lot of people who wanted a powerful general computer but bought a Pi instead, but it’s also furthering the misunderstanding of what the Pi is for.
The real advice is that everyone should be shopping for the right tool for the job. There are a lot of cool applications for the Pi where a NUC or old laptop or phone doesn’t make sense because you actually need the compact size, the low-level I/O, or some other feature. However anyone who can put a NUC or laptop side by side with a Raspberry Pi and consider them both viable options for their project probably shouldn’t have been looking at a single board computer to begin with.
There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.
Old mobile phones or laptops are riskier because of batteries. Some laptops can work without batteries as well, but do old phones?
Intel MacBook Pro from 2014 works but throttles the CPU to 800 Hz making it barely usable.
they did, with modifications
for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps.
'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products.
For my malware home lab, I decided to just reuse old phones and routers that nobody wanted anymore (quite literally got them from the trash bins). Now they're running an ARMv8 kernel as the host kernel and the rest is emulated or containerized, depending on the use case.
Works like a charm for most tasks I throw at it, and many old cheap Android phones have at least quad or octa cores in them, making them pretty awesome for podman/docker usage, too.
The only thing you have to look out for is to remove the battery, and that you use a separate power circuit with a step down converter to power it. But other than that, old smartphones have become amazing for selfhosting stuff now.