Comment by axegon_

Well... Yeah... I have a bunch of raspberry pis from back when they were cheap + a raspberry pi 400 I won at a hackathon a few years ago. There are things about them that I love(the older ones to be more specific): low power and great thermals. But ever since their prices skyrocketed, I have completely abandoned the newer ones and opted out for what me and my friends refer to as "cubes". Optiplex micros and similar ones. They are a tiny bit more expensive but you have expandable storage and memory and in lots of cases upgradable cpu if it comes down to it. And most importantly x86, which I take over ARM any day of the week, especially when I have to dive a layer or two deeper - it's just more convenient having all the additional tools.

However I have one or two projects that I keep kicking down the road due to time constraints which involves a rasprerry pi zero w2. The reason being is that it's compact, packs a decent punch and is extremely easy to power it from an 18650 battery and keep a low profile.

I'm fine with the current prices of the raspberry pis but it's hard to justify using one of them if you don't need GPIO pins or something that uses little power. My advice to the raspberry pi foundation is to stop trying to push performance and focus on features. I'd be the first in line to get a new raspberry if it comes with a battery hat and LoRa built in(the project I was referring to really). Here's another one(which ironically already sort of exists): the milkv duo. There are lots of cases when you don't need a full operating system 24/7, which would waste a lot of resources to do one-off tasks every now and then. Ideally you should be able to boot the OS from a sensor or some sort of signal, which is hooked to a very under-powered micro-controller only when you really need it, let it do it's job and then power it off. As we stand, the raspberry pi foundation largely offers the same product in different form factors with some arguably marginal upgrades, which most people don't really need.