The steps are to reduce, reuse, recycle.

Honestly getting cheap old laptops just make more sense for what most people use these for. Emulation on media servers will run just fine on an old thinkpad off eBay. We need to move tech to the Reuse stage

They’re also cheap, which is a huge benefit.

But yeah, I haven’t picked up a Pi in quite a while, the only one I still use is an emulator station and media streaming device. I’ve been seriously considering getting a RockPro64 to replace my NAS, which is a fantastic option if you want low power, decent performance, small form factor, and expandable IO (it has a PCIe x4 slot).

I wish you told me this two years ago before I bought one. It was just too underpowered to work for my use case. I was expecting like the power of a low/mid range smartphone.

It was 10x more expensive, but I got a steam deck for my usecase, which involved real time video decode for live streams of sports games. Raspberry Pi kept having micro stutters that made watching sports impossible.

I’ve found recent celeron/pentium and i3 nucs are really great for a balance of low power consumption (<13W) and reasonable performance. Their BIOS allows you to specifically set a power limit and customise other low level things like TAU etc, so you can tune the boost performance to your liking.

It’s a shame Intel discontinued them, the form factor itself was not the only thing setting them apart. The software was well thought out and the hardware just worked 😭

The (6th gen??) ones with programmable ring LEDs are extremely handy for telling system status at a glance, I’ve got three of them 🤫. If i’m not mistaken, a few nuc generations also had onboard GPIOs too?