Honest answer: I want systems in my house that have a better power to work ratio than I can get from a used laptop or NUC, but can still burst to high power when needed for workloads that either have bursty compute demands, or on the rare occasion I run a consistent high-demand workload. That said, the RPi5 doesn't fit the bill for me.
Since replacing an old workstation for secondary/media computer in my office, and my laptop with Apple Silicon systems, I've been incredibly pleased with the efficiency one can get from heterogeneous core layouts in traditional compute devices. Not to mention the drop in thermals in my office. The summer I swapped out that secondary/media machine for the Mac Mini, the temperature in my office dropped 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while being just as capable for the things I used that machine for.
I'd like to do the same for my compute nodes in the house, which power my homelab for various workloads. Apple hardware's value retention doesn't make sense to pick up, even used, especially when I would have to trust an Asahi-flavored distro to make that work, so the platform stability isn't there. I don't need GPIO, so most SBC offerings just don't make sense. The only thing that comes close is the LattePanda Sigma, which would get me an Intel platform with efficiency cores. A SBC or even a NUC-like platform with a higher core count, at the $3-500 price point, would honestly be great! It just doesn't seem to be a market yet, and I don't imagine it will be until we see more penetration with ARM as a desktop compute platform.
I'm pretty sure I could do all that with an array of stolen business PCs, after I machined the serial numbers off. It would be cheaper for sure.
Apologies if it wasn't clear, my original comment was a joke. It's becoming a pet peeve that comments about used computers, presumably from users in the third- or even the fourth-world (?) where money is really tight, dumb down just about every thread related to Raspberry Pi.
Since replacing an old workstation for secondary/media computer in my office, and my laptop with Apple Silicon systems, I've been incredibly pleased with the efficiency one can get from heterogeneous core layouts in traditional compute devices. Not to mention the drop in thermals in my office. The summer I swapped out that secondary/media machine for the Mac Mini, the temperature in my office dropped 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while being just as capable for the things I used that machine for.
I'd like to do the same for my compute nodes in the house, which power my homelab for various workloads. Apple hardware's value retention doesn't make sense to pick up, even used, especially when I would have to trust an Asahi-flavored distro to make that work, so the platform stability isn't there. I don't need GPIO, so most SBC offerings just don't make sense. The only thing that comes close is the LattePanda Sigma, which would get me an Intel platform with efficiency cores. A SBC or even a NUC-like platform with a higher core count, at the $3-500 price point, would honestly be great! It just doesn't seem to be a market yet, and I don't imagine it will be until we see more penetration with ARM as a desktop compute platform.