Doesn't sound like the 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on' that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.
The project goal has never been a 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on'. The whole point of the project is to build a small cheap PC to give away to school children to increase computer literacy, while making it attractive enough for normal people to buy to fund the charity side
That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.
To be fair, I'm guessing the majority of Pi's are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won't be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.
It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.
I've been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade --- think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.
My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that's not really relevant for me (headless, and don't really care about transcoding).
I ordered an OrangePi 3 recently for pihole purposes and it has been great, it’s also probably overkill for this use but hey it was actually in stock and not terribly expensive.
I’m running Emby with 4k content from an Odroid HC-2. If you have a 4k TV it should support the H.265 codec without transcoding so the resources for sending videos is low.
One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface.
IIUC PCIe2.0x1 means 0.5GB/s, which is slower than USB 2 (I'm talking USB 2 specs - no idea how USB actually performs in PIs). I can't wait for people to buy that NVME hat and mount WD Blacks on that :) READ BELOW
USB 2 is 480 Mb/s, not 480 MB/s. 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s, so the 500 MB/s from PCIe 2.0 x1 is quite a bit faster and is about the limit of what a SATA 3 interface could do. Also, sequential throughput isn't nearly as important as most people think. Random IO, which NVMe drives excel at, will make a far more noticeable impact on real world performance.