And I make $0/hour? How am I gonna afford it? kLaRnA, wheeerreee are you

I bought a 1GB Pi 5 to try out as a kodi box. It is not sufficient.

The most economical option for small computing is no longer a raspberry pi. It hasn't been for a while. Now it is an mini PC. You can get x86 performance for the same price.

The raspberry pi still serves a purpose with it's GPIO pins. If you need to make something physical then you may still find it useful. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

I bought a 8GB Pi 5 CanaKit from BestBuy 8 months ago for $180 (plus tax). That same kit is now $320. 78% price increase.

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.

I bought a 8gb rpi 5 for 82€. Lucky me.

Same

Damn it!

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

There's a few RISC-V SBCs in Pi form factor already.

Well your mistake was going for 1GB.

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

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...