Pi has its own niche where it's great... and "Desktop" is not it.
The moment you feel you don't care about power consumption, but you do need NVMe SSD and 8GB of RAM, it's time to look for something else.. NUCs are a great example and if you buy them used on eBay they can be even cheaper.
Personally, I’m loving my Pi 5. It is just in the sweet spot, enough performance for what I need it to do, it’s portable, very low energy usage, it runs off an SD card so it’s very easy to re-image or swap images.
The NUC device is a desktop computer. If you want a desktop then buy a desktop, that’s not what a Pi is for (despite some unwise marketing to the contrary).
If the v5 is too expensive then pick up a v4, they are bound to get cheaper as v5 availability increases.
This is a good take on it — I also like running mine off microSD cards, which makes it trivially easy to swap OSes when I'm tinkering.
It's a different type of device for a different purpose than standard desktop computing.
I would be interested in a Pi 500 if they decide to make one, but would really like having an M.2 2280 slot built in. Anything else would be a bonus. I have a Pi 400 set up for my kids to use to learn typing and mess around (I put some old Mac/DOS emulators on it and all my ancient apps from my old computers).
The NUC is portable in a sense, but the Pi is at the apex of portability. It weighs basically nothing and takes up very little space.
Perhaps most people don’t need to transport their Pi like me. Even so, the footprint definitely matters. The size and weight of the Pi means that it can be installed in many odd places. I have mine on a bookshelf.
If you need a computer it’s better to use a mini pc form factor from a major vendor that benefits from economies of scale. NUC’s aren’t great value. You can get used HP and Dell stuff used from IT recyclers for ~$150 that do circles around the Pi in terms of performance.
I never understood the fascination with the Pi. Especially with all the options today.
Ecosystem. Everybody was gaga over the RPi so if you wanted to do "Task X" you could find an online tutorial for it.
Of course, almost everything that doesn't involve an RPi Hat also works just fine on standard Linux machines. But not everybody gets that.
I watched this play out in real time. People wanted Octoprint to drive several 3D printers. They wanted one per printer and bought a whole bunch of RPi stuff. I pointed out that a used x86 desktop of any flavor was way cheaper and far more powerful, but shrug. Not my circus; not my monkeys.
True, although Octoprint is typically for making local devices network connectable to receive and manage prints. A traditional PC is better if it's expected to do any processing of models, but a $5 rpi0w powered by the bus is generally plenty.
Our challenge was scalability and portability. Printers in our farms often moved between labs and offices, and toting a whole PC with each one would have been limiting to where they could be set up, as well as create potential conflicts with IT policy. It was also simpler to image SD cards than hard drives (or to work with IT to create and manage deployable configurations).
In the end, $35/printer for raspi3b+s wasn't a big overall expense, unlike the time spent on training and maintenance. Now we pay 10x more for faster, higher quality printers that don't break down AND include network ports, but we only need 1/5th as many to operate at the same capacity.
A Beaglebone Black is a FAR better fit for the description of "ARM, low power, and GPIO".
A Beaglebone Black actually runs off of a 5V 500mA USB interface unlike the RPis that require non-standard 5V multi-Amp USB supplies. And it's GPIO system (along with everything else) is well documented and doesn't require NDAs.
And the RPi was only dirt cheap while it was being subsidized by Broadcom. Now that it's not, the RPI is more expensive than low end x86s that run rings around them.
The word "was" is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here. The Black was 2013, and the Pi was 2012, mate.
Arguably, the branding of the Pi is much better too, and they conquered the education market, and are widely available at various retailers. Not to mention the Pi compute modules being used in a lot of products by the likes of Korg.
If you need a daughterboard and an SSD to get away from SD cards then yeah it's going to get expensive. Maybe find an SBC family that likes to use eMMC?
Gen 1 was also an overstocked orphaned SoC. It was literally a freebie from Broadcom. People got spoiled.
The moment you feel you don't care about power consumption, but you do need NVMe SSD and 8GB of RAM, it's time to look for something else.. NUCs are a great example and if you buy them used on eBay they can be even cheaper.