Yeah, the best way to go is to have purchased a few of them 3+ years ago!

$78 for a 2gb pi is insane, you can get a massively more powerful used nuc/mini-pc on eBay for like $5 more.

Yeah, I haven't been able to find a Pi Zero W anyfuckingwhere and it's really annoying because I have a dedicated task I want to set one up for but I don't want to use my Pi4 for it because I have other plans for that.

I'd also like to get a Pi5 for the PCIe connectivity but fuck they're expensive these days...

I’ve bought two Pis post 2020 at MSRP, before the recent increase! They’re definitely not the way to go now though. I am happy I have a few for projects!

Keep an eye out for any thin clients that can't support Win11 that businesses are getting rid of. You might have some luck with them.

Decommissioned USFF business PCs if you want something that can handle a lot and a bit larger is OK.

In that size I'd say OrangePi or Radxa, but depends in your use case for which.

There are a few popular options, but i haven tried them personally yet:

• Orange pi
• Banana pi
• Odroid (coworker is a big fan of these)
• Rock64 (i think this ones very old)

https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/pi-pico2-linux (Yes, I'm kidding)

A couple years ago Le Potato was a good value prop. No idea if that’s true anymore.

If you don't need an rpi specifically (i.e. for the built in CEC) you're better off with something else.

Get a usff thinkcentre, like the m910 tiny. Insanely simple, upgradeable (nvme + 2.5", 2 sodimm slots), lots of usb and other connectics, supports 3 screens if you need that, low power, super small and can be found for cheap.

what’s it actually capable of nowadays?

I've got a Borg Backup server running on a Pi 2. I'm starting to play with Home Assistant on a Pi 4.

That Pi 4 has had a few lives so far. It served as a rather mediocre desktop running Ubuntu MATE for awhile. At the time I found RPi's "Pixel" desktop to be pretty unlivable, almost everything they'd done to LXDE to make Pixel was an exercise in breaking LXDE. MATE was reasonably functional. Building a Ryzen 3600 machine was of course a vast improvement.

I then transitioned that Pi 4 to an HTPC running OSMC (basically Debian Kodi). I had a couple of problems with it: 1. to put audio out the built-in audio jack, you had to edit some config file to enable the option in the menu. Because this is Linux, a Linux developer can't make his microdick hard enough to penetrate the layer of crust sealing the anus of his pinhole punctured blow-up doll if he ships a GUI that's good enough. 2. That entry in that config file kept either undoing itself, or what the system was looking for changed. I swear I'd put that line in, it would work for awhile, something would happen, and then I'd have to go in and change the line that's still in there to some other syntax to get it working again. 3. Driving a 4k60 display was another problem that kept unsolving itself. Sometimes it could do it through one HDMI port but not the other, oh no wait it's max 4k30, oh wait it can do 1080p60 though, oh but it's still driving the monitor at 4k30 in such a way that trying to play back 1080p60 gets out of sync with the audio, pauses for several seconds, then resumes. If you've got a 720p television and you intend to use its internal speakers maybe it'll work.

Seems to run Home Assistant okay though the SD card is probably doomed.

The gpio pins always made it a bit of a weird middle ground between a used NUC-type and an arduino and all the years since the pi1 have just shrunken the possible use cases for it as mini pcs have gotten cheaper and arduino-likes have gotten more powerful.

Imagine RISCV-berry pi tho that would be sex.

Not really though, given there's tons of cheap MCUs with the same or even more GPIOs available, and a USB/Wifi/Bluetooth connection away from doing the exact same thing as a Pi does. Could even whip up a linuxgpio driver that talks to your ESP32 fw and makes the same devfs gpiochipN endpoint available...

Yeah :(
I wonder if other SBCS are similarly speced but cheaper

Same

Well your mistake was going for 1GB.

That's barely enough for a basic headless server nowadays, let alone a full media suite.