Raspberry Pi: from a €39 gadget to €200 and a drawer

From the €39 Raspberry Pi to €200: the gadget that ends up in a drawer

Back in 2014 it could be bought for €39, according to one forum user's memory. Today, the 8 GB version has been seen advertised for €200. And yet, the question hovering over every conversation about the Raspberry Pi is not how much it costs, but how long it stays powered on before landing in the drawer of nostalgic gadgets. The short answer: it depends on whether you buy it with a purpose or out of technological romanticism.

The board was born as a cheap cult object for experimenting. That price turned it into an impulse purchase. Many of those compulsive purchases ended up stored away, not for lack of prior use, but because the project ran out before the hardware did. The pattern repeats itself: you buy it, set it up, enjoy it for a while, and shelve it when the next toy appears.

What people actually do with a Raspberry Pi that works

The most common use is as a low-power home server, running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Pi-hole and AdGuard to block ads across the whole home network, Home Assistant for home automation, MQTT, Node-RED, Zigbee2MQTT, download servers, backups and even control of solar installations. Some people have eight boards spread around the house, each with a different function, and a Pi 1B is still blocking ads.

The second big niche is emulation. One image, one card, and off you go playing the catalogue of your childhood. For PSX and below it's more than enough; even a Pi 2 handles 16-bit games effortlessly. It's the most rewarding use for anyone who doesn't want to fight with configurations.

The third is the one that has become the most professional: automating the home. Weather sensors, pollution, irrigation, cameras, robot vacuums orphaned from their server. A Pi Zero 2W is enough to run an aircraft tracking antenna or a modest web server.

The price problem: €200 for something that used to cost €39

This is where consensus breaks down. The board has become so expensive that some argue it's no longer worth it. A refurbished business mini PC —Lenovo ThinkCentre, Dell OptiPlex, HP EliteDesk— can be found for €80-150, draws 8-15 watts at idle and offers far more power, real SATA or NVMe and x86. A new mini PC with an Intel N100 runs around €120-200.

The energy calculation is the only ground where the Raspberry holds up: 5-10 watts versus the 50 of an i3. On around the clock, the consumption difference eventually pays off. But you have to do the math, and with the board at €200 the payback period stretches out. As one post sums it up: an i3 with a 500 GB drive can be found for €30-35 and has far more power.

The microSD card, the weak point nobody mentions when buying

MicroSD performance as a hard drive is poor and, under heavy use, the card dies sooner than you'd expect. The solution that keeps coming up is booting from a USB SSD or, on the Pi 5, using the PCIe connector with an NVMe HAT. The board supplies little current through its USB ports: a 2.5-inch drive usually works fine with the official power supply, but two can cause cutouts. For multiple drives, better to use their own power supply.

And what is a Raspberry Pi NOT good for?

Transcoding 4K video on the fly. Running Home Assistant with a handful of integrations and a database without the swap file starting to scream. Serious surveillance: the €8-12 ESP32-CAM cameras carry a 2 MP sensor that at night only produces noise. And local AI: machines capable of running models properly start at around €2,000, according to a calculation making the rounds.

The verdict: it's not the gadget, it's the purchase

The board doesn't fail. The impulse does. Those who buy it with a concrete project —blocking ads, building a lightweight NAS, emulating, automating— get years of service out of it. Those who buy it "to see what I can do with it" store it in the drawer next to their first Nokia and their Walkman. The difference between a server and a piece of junk is having decided before paying.