When Raspis first came out they were genuinely a massive innovation in having small computers people could learn on or build hobby projects from very cheaply.
Over the years this has changed as they have gotten expensive to the point of being out of this price range these days. There are cheaper alternatives.
I still think they are pretty cool pieces of technology for what they are but probably more niche than they used to be now.
for the current price, yes
Esp8266/Esp32-gang-with-asneeded-add-ons riseup!
I managed to get one second-hand from a friend who had upgraded. It was my first entry into self-hosting and running 24/7 automations, like public media archival scripts. Due to the popularity and forum support, it was pretty low-friction which allowed me to dive in easily without a mentor or excessive barriers. I had no hardware experience beyond assembling a PC from parts, so the accessibility was what gave me confidence to start.
A mini-PC would have been far more than needed, to the point it’s wasteful for this kind of work, and the better embedded options (I’m sure there are plenty, and cheaper) were just too intimidating or manual to have drawn me in.
Ancient cat at least walked into your home and killed pests
It’s cool because it draws next to no power at all… Unless your specific use case needs to survive on a bare trickle of electricity there is no reason anyone should be buying a pi over an off-lease 1L mini-pc
it’s small and low power so I stuck it above my fridge and it runs my Home Assistant with a bunch of doodads plugged into it (albeit it’s trash that they went with the SD card deal because every so often I just have to swap the card and restore from backup)
