Comment by deepsquirrelnet

I’m a long time user of raspberry pis for various tinkering projects. I think the GPIO and camera interface are important, but also the size. The pi zero I would consider to be generally the most functional format of the pis.

Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.

There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.

These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).