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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

8GB is a bit overkill though, of course depending on what you use it for but it is an unfair baseline.

2 GB costs a fraction (but maybe get 4 if you want/need margin) and is more than enough for most projects. And I say this as someone whose opinion is that 32 GB is the absolute bare minimum for a general purpose computer (including laptops).

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I have an old 3B+ for which I bought a 802.3af-to-microusb power thing on amazon for $9, attached an old USB webcam to it (let's consider this to be free, it's certainly fully depreciated) and it sits in a utility room watching an analog needle gauge on a furnace. The 1GB of RAM on it is totally adequate to snap photos, encode them into my choice of formats and send them somewhere on a periodic schedule. It's just PNG files now, but the schedule interval is low enough that I could even use its weak CPU to do something like encode the snaps into AVIF in a 5-minute job.

I did something similar with a raspberry pi 2 which also by itself is way overkill, it also had a usb-wifi dongle because when I realized that it didn't have wifi natively and running Ethernet was a bit cumbersome for a temporary project. But for these simple projects there is no point in buying the latest and greatest version.

When people remember the $35 pricepoint and lament the price increase of today they forget that they don't serve the same purpose anymore. Hell, the Zero 2 is cheaper than that and plenty powerful for a ton of projects.

I have the aforementioned 3B+ and one Pi 4 (I forget if it's 1GB or 2GB). For me they still serve the same purpose as the original for weird headless tasks like eyeballing a furnace needle gauge. One of the reasons I mentioned in my original post that thankfully the model 4 1GB is still about the same price at $49 Canadian.

If I needed another one I'd probably buy one at that price, but right now I don't have anything that needs a temperature sensor (DS18B20? Or similar) that can't have the same need better solved by a discrete piece of zigbee or zwave hardware like combo temperature/humidity sensor, or water leak detection sensor, tiny ammeter, tiny relay controller, something that integrates with home assistant.

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