Advantages of Raspberry Pi:
No fans, no moving parts, no dust. Huge amount of software, documentation, support available.
Then again, N100 can also be bought with passive cooling. But not so sure how the mini PCs of the article would fare without a fan.
You can also expect your hardware to have a shorter life.
mini PC:
[X] No fans available with atoms or i3s
[X] No moving parts
[X] x86... Huge amount of software
[X] documentation
The only thing is support but the raspberry foundation is also not really helpful if you go into the nitty gritty parts.
I've got one of those, and it houses a system with 8 CPU cores, 32 GB RAM (can be upgraded to 64 if need be), 1 TB NVMe and 4 TB SSD - and it's all inside, whereas with an RPi the SSD would have to be external. The only thing that's collecting dust now is the old RPi.
If you're just using it like a normal computer, then it's not special.
The fact that you can run a Linux on it means you can tap into a big ecosystem of existing software. Nice to have.
the rpi does have a ton of software compared to other SBCs, but the article is about fking x86 machines.
With power consumption so low on some of these, I feel like they defeat most of the benefit of ARM and you get way more native software on x86
It provides a WebRTC stream for a USB camera (or Pi Camera, what I'm using). Rather than the old, inefficient, low-quality MJPEG stream. The software itself will run on anything, but the WebRTC only works on a Pi for now.
I have concerns.