Baseline RAM Pi are still magnitudes cheaper, its a moot/niche above 2GB for most makers. Pi doesn't have to cater to lite servers only...

Gotta admit that Pi foundation never cared about batteries, especially since it's common with makers, audio removal etc...

Pi4 2GB with power source, SD card, case, fan is like $100. You can have nice Atom MiniPC for that. Or old PC from ebay...

But these are used, cheap new Atom miniPC doesn't have GPIO, and brand new Atom SBCs with GPIO are more $$$ with the same SoC compared to miniPC since they aren't mass produced. A used Pi with sdcard/case/fan is much less than $40.

USB GPIO dongles are a cheap addon to any x86 PC, e.g. "Adafruit General Purpose USB to GPIO" at https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

It (the 5) has a hw HEVC decoder, just no encoder

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...