You pay for the OS support. Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
It's still works but I sent mine back with an about 3 days since I couldn't do all the things I could do on a raspberry pi.
Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges.
I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job.
You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features.
If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.
There are lots of projects that need a small cheap computer that doesn't really need display.
And actually many raspberry pis are sitting around doing nothing, because people realize that they aren't interested in the embedded side of it, but the "computer" side of it is too weak to do anything useful. In that sense it is even worse than a mini PC which has enogh power to do some "real" light computer work.
And I didn't make any of this up. These are real things that I see people talk about, all the time.
No you don't. RPi5, zero upstream Linux support 7 months after release.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5
Zillion dollar (pound?) company, apparently, and they rely on some volunteers from SUSE for even basic upstreaming. If you're paying them for OS support, you're throwing out the money.
> Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
No they are not. If anything it was always RPi that was its own quirky thing.
Pretty much all of my SBCs are some form of mainline U-Boot booting mainline Linux (sometimes + a few patches) and a standard Linux userspace. Very uniform.
RPi 2+ I have is some weird bootloader that doesn't fit the wider SBC ecosystem, with its own special configuration, and a lot of RPi only tooling to control their firmware running on the graphics CPU or whatever.
If you buy a different board and things don't work your on your own.
You're rarely on your own. And even if you are, it's much easier when you have an actual detailed SoC documentation, board schematics, and when things are not some weird ad-hoc thing, but something fairly standard like U-Boot, that you already know and can re-use the knowledge of on any other board, without any vendor lock-in, etc. And when the docs are not some completely ridiculous thing that Rpi was known for years ago.
The libraries for a pi hat might only exist for the pi for example. I guess I could write my own library though.
Are you serious? :) At least compare with something like Allwinner H3/A10/... which had similar lifetime.