It's in a middle ground between Pi 4 (which is cheaper and can idle a tiny bit little lower) and N100 (which is nominally more expensive—varies greatly by region, but is faster with better IO and more compatibility, though integrating with GPIO-related stuff is more annoying). The CM5 makes more sense for a lot of use-case specific purchases though, like I upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from CM4 to CM5 and the performance difference is noticeable.
Other manufacturers make much faster (and more efficient, though similarly-priced, accounting for performance) SBCs now, but the support side (e.g. I download an image and it runs 2, 3, 5, or 10 years from now) is much worse, unless you're used to hacking on Linux kernels and following device-specific forums to resolve your issues.
8GB pi5 is $80 Power brick around $15 Decent cooled case $20 Heat sink $8 SD $15-20 And this is all excluding NVMe hat with NVMe drive, ie you’re stuck with absolutely miserable storage I/O.
Or you can N100, 8GB (replaceable and expandable RAM, 256GB NVMe (also replaceable) for $140.
Pi5 does not make any sense in this day and age, unless you specifically need GPIO for your tinkering. You can save $30 by going with the 2GB pi5 option but that seems the wrong direction to go. N100 is more than 50% better performance with similar or lower cost and better support for off the shelf ram and ssd.
Also it has easily-accesible GPIO and other interfaces like I2C, SPI, UART, etcetera.
I think the stronger argument/usecase is it's a drop-in replacement for the pi4. So if you're already dedicated to that form factor...
pi5 number go up
For anyone building a little homelab or whatever, especially in the US where triple the (low) power consumption from 3 to 9W+ isn't a big deal, a used SFF/mini PC is a better value proposition. Especially if you want to add storage, 2.5 Gbps networking, etc.
But for people integrating a computer into a larger project (robotics, automation, controls, etc.), or buying a little 'IoT' device to tinker with, buying used gear that is often much larger and usually requires a large external power brick might be a turn-off.
You can get an intel N100 box with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD for just over $100 now. Faster and cheaper than a comparable Pi 5. Uses a bit more power though.
Educated guess: Could add as much as $10 a year if its running continuously.
Doing so is absolutely disingenuous.
I was sceptical at first too, but in the end the Pi 4 now feels like the Pi 3B+ felt against the Pi 4 (and that was just a 30% perf boost, this is 3x). I.e. just hopelessly slow in comparison, and the few I've got will be relegated only to the least demanding projects. The Pi 5 is now the standard Pi.
I've got their first board since 2016 and it's been running cooler than a raspberry pi 4 (2019) with the same software on it.