> The goal of raspberry pi's was to have a standard GPIO connected to a moderately powerful and cheap computer for educational purposes.

At first it was a blessing that the Raspberry Pi gained popularity as a general purpose computer, not just for education and embedded applications. The additional demand and popularity brought more money and development attention to the ecosystem.

At some point, which I could never really put my finger on, this general purpose computer popularity grew so large that the embedded systems and educational aspects of Raspberry Pi seemed almost forgotten by the mainstream users. At a local in-person meetup group it was a running theme for people to brag about how many Raspberry Pis they owned for different purposes and to boast about using them for applications where they didn’t really fit. In person I’ve heard more about Raspberry Pi NAS systems (where people are always disappointed with the performance and the price of forcing a Pi into this role) or Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters (which mostly sat idle and could have been replaced by a single PC with more RAM).

This reached such a critical mass that it almost seemed like the mainstream discussion forgot the original purpose of the Pi and thought it was literally just another computer, but small. Most people who tried to use it for this purpose were left slightly frustrated by how it didn’t perform like they wanted a computer to perform.

So now every discussion about Raspberry Pi attracts comments about how nobody should buy a Pi when you can buy a NUC or laptop or some other used piece of hardware and it’s so much “better”. This is the right advice for a lot of people who wanted a powerful general computer but bought a Pi instead, but it’s also furthering the misunderstanding of what the Pi is for.

The real advice is that everyone should be shopping for the right tool for the job. There are a lot of cool applications for the Pi where a NUC or old laptop or phone doesn’t make sense because you actually need the compact size, the low-level I/O, or some other feature. However anyone who can put a NUC or laptop side by side with a Raspberry Pi and consider them both viable options for their project probably shouldn’t have been looking at a single board computer to begin with.

There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.