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> It's a good target if you want to provide something very close to a "turn-key appliance" without actually selling your own hardware: You can provide an image that a user writes to a microSD card, plugs in, and it just works.

Better yet - they boot from USB now (and even NVMe if you're using a CM4).

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You're missing (IMO) the fun one: PXE. Micro SD cards go bad frequently, and this turns the RPi into a Line Replaceable Unit. Should one ever have coffee spilled on it, a new one is plug and play, with (excluding hardware availability) relatively little downtime.

For many use cases, yeah, PXE is great. Classrooms/labs, digital signage, or anywhere you need distributed I/O, it makes total sense.

The biggest downside is your PXE server going down is going to kill all the Pis, so if you are doing something important you need a highly-available PXE setup. And if you have that, it's probably a better place to host a lot of the services people use Pis for in the first place.

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