[kube-system]

However, you can buy a lot of electricity for the price of a scalped RPi these days.

[timeon]

This is true. But some people are not concerned just about the price.

[tasuki]

What are you concerned about?

[SkyPuncher]

The feeling of waste when I'm running a 20 watt laptop in the corner 365/24/7.

[tasuki]

20 watt is very little. Are you sure it's more of a waste than buying a brand new energy-efficient device?

[kube-system]

Depends on the use case and your perspective. If you want to run a few dozen lines of code to do something like monitoring a sensor and calling an API endpoint -- a microcontroller can do that with milliwatts of power.