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When you add up prices of:
- pi itself
- this hat that is necessary if you want more reliable storage
- heatsink and case with fan, which is now also necessary to cool it
- their Fancy power adapter, which is necessary because they couldn’t be bothered to add USB pd or USB qc
Total cost of entry becomes much less attractive for hobby use and is close enough to cheaper or used mini PCs which allows for much smoother experience in regards to os support
Literally none of those are necessary unless you want a specific usecase that uses them all. Like using it as a desktop PC, in which case yeah no shit buying a literal desktop PC is cheaper.
It started with the pi4 already. If weight and size doesn’t matter and you don’t need the IO pins, then rather buy a cheap NUC. Faster, properly build complete package and unironically needs less power when idleing.
NUC
for the power usage and size? I don’t think so. NUC’s are 150 euro+
The silly thing is that Pi5, at least currently, tends to idle at basically the same or higher power than your average Intel N100 NUC-like PC. This might change in the near future with firmware upgrades (just like it has changed for Pi 4). Those N100 PCs can be had for ~200€ with SSD, memory etc - ready to go in comparable form factor.
Pi does still make a ton of sense if you keep it rather basic, but equipping it fully with a nice case/cooling, m.2 SSD and proper PSU does bring it within spitting distance of price of basic NUCs. Against those it loses pitifully in performance department (as well as efficiency!) - which you likely cared about at least somewhat if you went out of your way to add performance-related stuff to the Pi to begin with.
they couldn’t be bothered to add USB pd
The Pi absolutely uses USB PD, it’s just that the 5V/5A profile isn’t a mandatory one and not supported by many power supplies. And 3A supplies work as well, you just can’t pull massive amounts of power via USB.
12100 with h610 board cost about same. Even comes with a heatsink. Lol
Well, if you use it mostly for GPIO, you don’t really need any of that. At the same time though you likely don’t need a Pi 5 (or likely even Pi 4) to begin with as any Pi will do GPIO without problems.
That said the cooling requirements are often quite overstated - outside of niche uses where you actually run at full throttle for sustained periods of time, you don’t really need to care about it. Sure, it will throttle if you run stress-ng for more than few minutes, but so what? If your workload hammers the Pi at 100% of all cores for long time, you are using wrong platform to begin with.