What's the point of this? Where does it fit, who is it aimed at apart from Explaining Computers and good old Jeff Geerling (hiya Jeff!).
Maybe if it has been designed into a retro style case or something?
As it stands it's very hard to see who would want this.
Since the original 500's release I have never seen a single forum post (in generic tech discussions) about the product.
In other words, for me who spends lots of timing reading/watching discussions/reviews of gadgets, this never came up once, anecdotally.
I don't think you are alone in your confusion.
One has been sitting in my hallway closet running a pretty complex HA setup. It has been so rock solid that I more or less forgot about it.
But I assume that's not the pi 500? I mean, this series has/is a keyboard, and if you are just running it as a server, you save some money by buying a regular version
Yes, a Pi 500.
This one has been on my radar as a first computer for my son for a while - just lock out the wifi and set it up with a "boot to basic" image maybe?
Certainly something which could grow to support some Arduino work.
EDIT: Admittedly this would be a no brainer if there was an off-the-shelf Atari ST style thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST purely for the sheer mass providing some protection.
Kids don't want "boot to basic". Old fogey's like me brought up on Commodore 64 look back on boot to basic like the good old days, but "boot to basic" is long gone and no-one is interested in that, except conceptually old people think it makes kids learn because that's what made them learn, but back in the old days you tolerated boot to basic in a world in which the only computer for 3 square miles was the BBC micro sitting in front of you.
I think this "boot to basic" idea fails with contemporary software. Just basic thought experiment. When was last time you did any project with full knowledge of what exactly you were going to use? And by full I mean every single software library and tool down to specific version. These days you need to be able to pull dependencies or tools from Internet. Anything else would be just torturing or wasting yourself.
It made sense when you did not have infra build for distributing things and things made were pretty simple. Now I feel like it would be just waste of time.