$50 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 comes with a lower price and a tweaked, cheaper CPU

Pi's aren't a great value for general purpose computing when cube-PCs will get you orders of magnitude more power and functionality for 2-4x the price, and people often neglect to factor in the price of a case, PSU, storage which stack up the cost rapidly.

Every generation I grab a couple of the latest model-B and run a few quick desktop tests to see where they're at subjectively (no benchmarks, just boot it up and "use" it) and Pi 5 is still orders of lower than what I expect from a computer.

Put them to work in a specific application and their reliability and great ubiquity shine; I have a couple of Pis in 3D printers, one powering a touch-screen dashboard, a couple in my server rack for Hashicorp Vault, Unifi Server, ARM build server, a half a dozen or so in home-made speaker/TTS devices, a couple in retro gaming-handhelds, one in a dedicated WiFi AP for MiTM/testing/traffic-inspection, and one with a NVMe HAT running a file-server for low-power network storage.

Each Pi serves a purpose, and I've allocated a device a specific model based on its requirements; a couple of them are probably over-powered just due to having a specific Pi spare, but I try to shuffle them around to be using the weakest/cheapest Pi available that suits the purpose.

(Don't ask how I know it)

But yeah, if you don't care about timing, that will work.

Here's an example. A few years ago I was contracted to build a device that would input some data, do real time signal processing, and output the data in a different format. The quickest and probably cheapest way to get it done was to use a $15 analog chip to do the bulk of the processing. I based that board on an Arduino Nano (clone, of course!).

A year or two later, much faster microcontrollers like ESP32 had arduino support and were trivial to use. A single ESP32 would probably have replaced most of the other components on my board, reduced inventory required, reduced power consumption and a host of other benefits.

But I never bothered because there was no economic pressure to do so. I was selling a $300 device to a single customer who didn't care about the price, and I had better things to do with my time than redesign a board that worked perfectly.

TBH, if I wanted to, I could probably have increased the price of the current board by the same amount that redesigning with an ESP32 would have gained me.

This is one reason I avoid consumer products like the plague. I'd rather work with people to whom there's no effective difference in cost between $300 hardware and $700 hardware because the benefit to them far exceeds what I'm charging.

I guess I'm agreeing with you :-)

The usual HN discussion of RPi goes something like this:

"The RPi 5 has gotten too expensive, these days intel small-form-factor PCs (possible second hand) are a better choice, giving better performance and no messing around with microsd cards"

"I need GPIOs, sub-3-watt power consumption, and I don't need the performance of the most expensive RPi model"

"If you need GPIOs and low power, why not ESP32?"

Totally in agreement with you though, even as a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, the Pi 5s are overkill for the tasks they're capable of, and overpriced and underperforming in the tasks a mini-PC can do for 2-4x the price (maybe less once you factor in a PSU, case, storage etc).

A system that's appropriately designed for low power draw should be notably less than that.

I've got an N305 laptop that I'm using as a home server that idles at 4-5W.