I have to think most Pi’s in the wild are sitting idle most of the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive projects? I certainly don’t need more CPU to run a pihole or a rain gauge or whatever.
I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few other minor services.
Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p, maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex users do need 4k transcoding though.
Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still probably better on the price/performance ratio.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited.
(Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)
What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can so nearly do it with the right sized model, the latency isn't good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2 is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC it's plugged into isn't an option.
Like I say, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but it's close enough that I think the problem is just a matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.
The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and off.
Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you’ll never get to median because people won’t be able to run and test the edge cases.
Of course as you go up costs rise and eventually you might as well buy a Mac mini or similar.
But pis are easy to build and manage and that’s the platform my kid likes.
Moving to the Raspberry Pi 5 just isn't an option, because I'm already memory limited at 8 gigs, so 4 gigs would be unusable.
I bought my Orange Pi 5 with 16 gigs, so I'm quite looking forward to doing the upgrade! Granted, there might not be too many other people putting this much work on Pis, but when you're power constrained, they're an excellent option.