These jasper lake/etc machines are usually between $100 and $200 new and are a much better deal than an 8G rpi, even at MSRP for a laundry list of reasons starting with they are much more capable machines.
Look for chuwi herobox, beelink, etc
The pi's were priced right when they were $35, because adding storage, case, RTC hat, powersupply, etc would double or triple the machine build cost but still land <$100 when the floor on cheap PC's (usually Via) were in the $300 range. But driving the price up for just a tiny amount of ram...?
These days you can buy new windows tablets for $200 (from big companies like HP for example), and these low end NUC style boxes frequently for less than $100. Sure the perf isn't great, but even the worst are equal or better than the very aged A72, low clocked designs lacking even crypto acceleration you find in the rpi4.
Never mind if your actually trying to just save money, midrange refurb and used machines from a couple years back will give you perf within a few percent of the current hardware in the same price range, and its going to be far more capable.
(I just stumbled on a very capable i5 based HP slim fanless desktop, refurb for $109 on amazon while checking the prices of that chuwi. There are a bunch of these "laptop in a slim desktop" case systems frequently for very reasonable prices.)
These jasper lake/etc machines are usually between $100 and $200 new and are a much better deal than an 8G rpi, even at MSRP for a laundry list of reasons starting with they are much more capable machines.
Look for chuwi herobox, beelink, etc
The pi's were priced right when they were $35, because adding storage, case, RTC hat, powersupply, etc would double or triple the machine build cost but still land <$100 when the floor on cheap PC's (usually Via) were in the $300 range. But driving the price up for just a tiny amount of ram...?
These days you can buy new windows tablets for $200 (from big companies like HP for example), and these low end NUC style boxes frequently for less than $100. Sure the perf isn't great, but even the worst are equal or better than the very aged A72, low clocked designs lacking even crypto acceleration you find in the rpi4.
Never mind if your actually trying to just save money, midrange refurb and used machines from a couple years back will give you perf within a few percent of the current hardware in the same price range, and its going to be far more capable.
(I just stumbled on a very capable i5 based HP slim fanless desktop, refurb for $109 on amazon while checking the prices of that chuwi. There are a bunch of these "laptop in a slim desktop" case systems frequently for very reasonable prices.)