> the raspberry pi is still an amazingly cost effective choice
It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up.
If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually already in mini-PC price territory and you can get something much more capable and feature complete for about the same price, or for a few £ more, something significantly more capable, better CPU, iGPU, you'll get an RTC, proper networking, faster storage, more RAM, better cooling, etc, etc, and you won't be using much more electricity either.
I went this route myself and have figuratively and literally shelved a bunch of Pis by replacing them with a MiniPC.
My conclusion, for my own use, after a decade of RPi use, is that a cheap mini PC is the better option these days for hosting/services/server duty and Pis are better for making/tinkering/GPIO related stuff, even size isn't a winner for the Pi any more with the size of some of the mini-PCs on the market.
It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up.
If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually already in mini-PC price territory and you can get something much more capable and feature complete for about the same price, or for a few £ more, something significantly more capable, better CPU, iGPU, you'll get an RTC, proper networking, faster storage, more RAM, better cooling, etc, etc, and you won't be using much more electricity either.
I went this route myself and have figuratively and literally shelved a bunch of Pis by replacing them with a MiniPC.
My conclusion, for my own use, after a decade of RPi use, is that a cheap mini PC is the better option these days for hosting/services/server duty and Pis are better for making/tinkering/GPIO related stuff, even size isn't a winner for the Pi any more with the size of some of the mini-PCs on the market.