> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.
It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).
But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.
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).