>>6There really isn't a point in getting a Pi these days.
The Pi 5 is heading into "just buy one of the myriad x86 mini-PCs on the market" territory and is VASTLY lower performance. Honestly, I really want to replace the Pi at some point (web browsing on it sucks ass right now - wasn't so bad years ago, but modern websites suck and running a modern browser also sucks on the fairly limp CPU), but I'm being cheap and a bunch of shit keeps coming up that demands money, so I haven't been able to justify the upgrade.
A fully loaded Pi 5 kit in the US is north of $100, and I can totally just get a used mini-PC with like 8x the speed instead.
My Pi 4 was like $60 with everything; board, case, power supply, shitty SD card. No keyboard/mouse, but I had one.
Anyone who bought one of the $180 kits I'm seeing is being fleeced and for $20 more, you can actually get a NEW x86 mini-PC, so the value proposition is not there at all.
The Pi made the mini-PC market explode, but now there are just way better options if you aren't doing something where the GPIO pins are useful... and if I'm completely honest, you might be in the market for the very cheap, easy to use bare-metal Pi Pico line instead in that case. I should buy more of those, they're dead useful. GP2040-CE is a wonderful bit of software, lets me make basically anything I want into a useful USB game controller.
I actually outright don't see a real use for getting a Pi 5 now, unless you really don't like x86, in which case most other ARM boards are shit - they're faster, but the level of software and hardware support isn't anywhere near what the Pi has; you don't want to run some shitty hacked up kernel from 4 years ago until the end of time and have an entire section of the board that still doesn't have drivers.
Some of that last bit is hyperbole, but not nearly as much as it should be.