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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling that by the time I've paid for that and the hat I could probably have bagged a Lenovo mini PC...

You can get entire PCs way more powerful than any generation of Pi, with more connectivity/port options, for roughly the price of a pi + case, on eBay. It’s long been true that if you don’t need or want some of the particular characteristics or features of a Pi (compact size + GPIO, say), they’re not a great purchase.

This is true is all you need is a cheap compute box. RPis give GPIO pins, compact size, and relatively low power usage. If you want something comparable, maybe an old mobile phone + a USB GPIO breakout board would fit the bill better.

It's not the same buying a new product from official supplier, to buying something old and/or used from an unknown entity on eBay.

Certified refurbishers usually sell fine machines, and give a year of guarantee, or so.

You can get a new Lenovo mini PC with these features for the price of a new Raspberry Pi 5 and its accoutrements?

As others have said, ebay. One thing that helps is looking for "thin clients" - I know the Dell Wyse (not Lenovo obviously, but an example) can be "unlocked" to install normal Linux fairly easily. First page of results has options for under $30USD with free shipping (probably US only, but still).

Don't get me wrong: I've got a cheap (~$50 USD, delivered) Lenovo M600 here that I like just fine. It's a dandy little PC that does all kinds of normal PC stuff without any hacks required at all. (It runs Home Assistant rather well in a virtualized environment, and that's exactly what I bought it for.)

But there's a lot of things I can do with a Raspberry Pi [5] that I can't do with the M600.

Some examples off the top of my head:

I can't do hardware tinkering with it, like plug in a DS18B20 temperature sensor or blink an LED (or a video wall worth of WS2812s), due to lack of accessible GPIO. There's huge swaths of interesting projects that this lack of GPIO cuts out completely. (I'm thus also not particularly interested in using an M600 as a Klipper host for my custom 3D printing rig.)

I can't attach random PCIe devices to the M600 (as far as I know) to do things like run Stable Diffusion or run a small storage array (homebrew NAS!) due to the lack of an accessible PCIe interface.

The package is small by x86 PC standards, but it enormous by Raspberry Pi standards. Consequently, I'm not taking an M600 with me in my backpack to a hotel to tinker with when I'm out of town for work (whereas I barely notice a Pi in my backpack).

And the M600 is frankly pretty boring. Raspberry Pi devices are fun to goof around with, whereas dealing with the M600 feels exactly like dealing with my desktop PC feels (only slower). Having fun with computers is very important to me, and learning-oriented SBCs are a lot more fun than stodgy corpo off-lease "thin client" PCs are.

And speaking of off-lease: The M600 was already well-used when I got it. It showed up in good condition and I think it represented a good value at the time that I bought it, but newness matters.

It -especially- matters in a price comparison.

I would not recommend a thin client. They are very underpowered as they are designed to essentially boot to RDP and nothing else. Much better off with a mini as they are "real" desktops computers.

alder lake n100 mini-pc on amazon is $120. It has 8x the CPU perf plus normal OS for same power

ebay...

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