just less flexible.

given the premiums they were selling for over the past few years, you could get a Dell Optiplex Mini or Intel NUC for the same price and use something Proxmox to virtualise a whole bunch of VMs / containers on the same device.

for instance, i'm using an Intel NUC which runs my Pi-hole DNS instance, network hardware management server, Bitcoin node, Usenet clients (SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr), Torrent client, and some VMs for testing.

in doing so, i have been able to free up 2 switch ports, 2 GPO outlets and simplify management and backups.

Pi's are great at the right price point and use case. hopefully they increase manufacturing capacity and prices remain reasonable moving forwards.