Technology

The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there's the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there's the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it's only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

• Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
• Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100

Here's one nice list which also reflects the status of their usefulness. Physical availability varies widely, though.

https://www.armbian.com/download/