Interesting. I'm curious why they would do that.

1. buy stuff for $50

2. 3d print a couple of cases for $10

3. repurpose highschool summer break crypto project .. free? (excluding time spent)

4. ???

5. profit from selling it for $400 a pop

All the stuff is off the shelf. Makes it way easier to develop. There is no reason to actually use RPi, compute module or not, as a base camera board (talking from experience) other than it is super easy to start with.

I disagree. If CM5 had the ability to sleep at tiny fractions of a watt, there are really practical and usable cameras you can pull off today, even when it's not the most efficient. For all the downsides, it would more than make up in the ease-of-development department.

I believe if RPi6 adds sleep, you'd see a flurry of portable gadgets built on the platform.

You're agreeing with them, not disagreeing! :)

The person who you replied to said they only reason to choose them is easiness, and you've replied saying you disagree because for all the downsides the easiness makes up for it.

Speed of development is fine for a prototype, but for an actual product it is just sloppy and wasteful. Problem isn’t even battery hungriness, but boot time. Users don’t want to wait 20-60 seconds for their camera to load an entire Linux kernel and drivers and then all the software you have gobbled together on top when you could be up and running almost instantly if you used microcontroller instead of cpu