[Matsta]

By the time you get a Rpi 4, a decent power supply and an external SSD, it's usually around the same price as a mini PC which you can get with a 7th/8th/9th Gen i3 or even i5 with everything included.

I get that the Rpi will use less power, but I imagine many people will be like me and have it overclocked to 2.1ghz, and my heatsink was pretty warm all day long.

I've recently picked up a Optiplex 3070 with a i5 9500t for $120 and bought 32gb of ram off ebay for another $40. Considering a Rpi 4 is going for $100 on eBay, it's not a bad deal at all.

[Eisenstein]

RPis are used as embedded controllers and such instead of a custom solution, which is why they are so hard to get right now -- many companies based their products on them when they were plentiful and now get priority over end-users for distribution. It is (or was) kind of a scandal as RPi's self-mandate was to provide cheap computing devices for learning, not for businesses to make products.

[monocasa]

I've heard a rumor too that the rpi foundation is having a legal spat about that part with Broadcom right now too. Broadcom is pissed that their chips they were using as a tax right off are being sold for profit. That's why you can get RP2040 boards like the Pico no problem; they don't contain Broadcom IP blocks.

[bmitc]

Ahh, that's interesting. I have been wondering why their newest product and design was the most (and only) readily available one.

[nsteel]

The difference in availability is certainly related to Brcm's involvement but that could just as easily be Brcm's capacity problem, rather than a spat for which there's no official word on (and it makes no difference to consumers anyway).

[bmitc]

This is almost exactly where I'm at. Amazon has quite a few ridiculously cheap refurbished units of Dell OptiPlex Micro, Lenovo M series, and Intel Nuc products. The Raspberry Pis I have (3 and 4) are impossible to use as a desktop, and they are actually ill-suited for embedded cases due to their power draw.