No, you are probably correct for your own circumstances.
I was shopping for something to run Home Assistant on last week. (if you don't know about HA, check it out, it's crazy good!). I was befuddled, I kept coming back to online threads like this where people claim these mini PCs are much better than a Pi 5 setup AND cheaper too. That's just not true for my region, because of a very confusing, complex set of constraints:
- Most of these good, new, low-power Mini PCs are not imported into my country
- The ones that are imported are higher-end versions (e.g. Beelink S12 Pro) which cost more than twice the Pi setup
- I can buy from Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc. and get it imported but the import tax is so huge it stops being cheaper
- I can easily get a second hand Mini PC in the cheaper-than-Pi5-setup range, but all of them are old machines with high power consumption that'll them more expensive than the Pi5 setup in a single year or two, with my current price of electricity
In the end I opted for a Pi5 4GB, which is more than enough for running HA. The total was $125 for the full setup with cooler fan, 128GB SSD and original power supply. Though I got the Pi5 second hand, otherwise the total would be $145.
I was shopping for something to run Home Assistant on last week. (if you don't know about HA, check it out, it's crazy good!). I was befuddled, I kept coming back to online threads like this where people claim these mini PCs are much better than a Pi 5 setup AND cheaper too. That's just not true for my region, because of a very confusing, complex set of constraints:
- Most of these good, new, low-power Mini PCs are not imported into my country
- The ones that are imported are higher-end versions (e.g. Beelink S12 Pro) which cost more than twice the Pi setup
- I can buy from Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc. and get it imported but the import tax is so huge it stops being cheaper
- I can easily get a second hand Mini PC in the cheaper-than-Pi5-setup range, but all of them are old machines with high power consumption that'll them more expensive than the Pi5 setup in a single year or two, with my current price of electricity
In the end I opted for a Pi5 4GB, which is more than enough for running HA. The total was $125 for the full setup with cooler fan, 128GB SSD and original power supply. Though I got the Pi5 second hand, otherwise the total would be $145.