Yep, the small form factor market is amazing now. A cheap N100 blows any RPi away and will be similar in cost and power consumption. You also get nifty things like a semi-usable iGPU and QuickSync which is perfect for transcoding.

> And at $400 it doesn't make sense for it to be.

Why are so many people angry at a situation that doesn't exist?

The use cases above don't need a $385 16GB Raspberry Pi 5.

Did you notice they weren't even using a Raspberry Pi 5?

A 1GB Raspberry Pi 4, which would run those applications, is $35 and in stock: https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-1gb/

The 1GB RPI4 can definitely not be used as a main desktop. I make my son use a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of RAM to code simple stuff for school, and it's barely usable because the UI is extremely laggy.

You are the one making up a situation here.

Please read the comment thread you're responding to.

I'll quote it for you:

> A Pi 4 is my son's primary computer

So, no, I am not making up a situation.

He's telling you that it'd run terribly with 1GB. He's not wrong.

Maybe you could get a bit more perf out of it using a lighter environment. Sway and a terminal text editor (if vim is too much for your son, maybe micro would be better for its CUA binds) would probably run well. Avoid the web browser, or maybe try a lighter one like w3m.

There's compromising and then there's just not having a usable machine.