[cdt5050]

The Raspberry Pi has three huge advantages over those other options:

1) GPIO, letting you do things like learning to flash LEDs or controlling robotic arms and getting ready to use a Pi Zero for robots or such.

2) Cool add-ons, like the Pi Camera or AI modules, and a product family such as compute modules, Pi Zero, etc. A strong third party market of Hats, etc.

3) SUPPORT. Pi 500 is available as part of a kit with the official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, which I know from experience in teaching people interested in learning this kind of stuff, is a really awesome getting started resource. But it doesn't stop there -- Raspberry Pi Press has a lot of freely available books that teach various topics, AND a monthly magazine to teach and inspire. Not to mention countless tutorials meant specifically for Pi and Pi OS.

This is really, really awesome.

Those ebay specials aren't going to satisfy any of these. And while direct RPi competitors do provide a response to the first point, they get weak on the second point, the RPi is pretty unique in the third point.

[cben]

Radxa X4 board specifically has x86 N100, an M.2 slot (a short one) and GPIO (though you need to flash the on-board RP2040 to access them? haven't tried yet). I'm quite happy with it as a cheap desktop. Documentation is pretty OK? Nowhere like the tutorials ecosystem around RPi but Radxa are certainly trying to provide detailed info.

One sweet quality of RPi this lacks was being unbrickable — the entire state was on SD card; screw up and you can just write a new card. (Recent RPis complicate that with an a boot flash). But by now I've bricked enough RPis by electrical damage — including an 400 — to not be as excited about that :-]

I do agree with your analysis. All I'm saying is if one is considering a competitor, the X4 with x86 running mainline linux might be a safer bet than most less-documented ARM boards...

[6SixTy]

Those things are cool in their own right, but most of those belong within the context of someone looking to make something or learn electronics. Not necessarily something that someone looking to use one as a fully fledged computer is going to appreciate. And the Pi 500 definitely swings in the direction of computer.

[cdt5050]

The Pi 500 does definitely swing in the direction of the computer.

IMO the target demographic of the Pi 500 are people who want, first and foremost, a desktop PC, but one that is well suited to hobbyist computing and/or computing education.

Yeah, if you JUST want to run a word processor, browser, etc. one of those N100 PC's might make more sense. If you open up an issue of MagPi magazine and feel inspired, then the Pi 500 might make more sense. And that's what it really comes down to. Is computing, itself, a hobby or interest to you, or not?