> It's amazing how much they've lost the tinkerer audience over the last few years.

They haven't lost it. Their goal was to kickstart something and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The space has moved - a usable computer now demands a lot more than the original Pi, and they realized that - this is why their tinkerer platform is the RP2040 family. The market is very healthy and the ESP32 family has a huge space.

What RPi brought was the idea that a platform with good software support would allow for a revolution in the space above the power of an Arduino.

Do tell! I know Microcenter has a house brand for Arduino now but I didn't see much in the way of "knock-off brand" for Raspberry Pi

Even if you want the GPIO the RPI Zero or Pico are much better options. If you want fast computation on top of that simply buy any other computer and send signals to the Zero or Pico for the GPIO pins.

good future HN headline.

my turn :

"2029: Using JEV to decide which bunker dweller is next on the menu."

Making any recent second-hand smartphone a SBC-equivilent field computer is always a custom job/not scalable.

OF course, that shouldn't matter for most tinkerer jobs like a CarPi. But anecdotally, I tried using my old iphone 13 (idk why I tried this) and then a couple old galaxies for my car project taking data from bluetooth dongle and relaying to a custom gui I made. Of course also dealing with power cycles and screen, data trasnfer etc.

Very, very quickly it became easier to justify buying a SBC for the same project

For a bit more physical space, used laptops have the same and more.

I run a headless laptop as a server and it works great, and just sips power. It didn't have Ethernet built-in, so I just replaced the WiFi card with one and it worked just fine (and also let me panel mount the connector for a DIY 1U enclosure).

While I did not get it myself, I recently saw a business laptop I was hawking with 8GB of RAM and a relatively modern CPU sell for less than $50 on eBay. All that was wrong with it was a bad back panel; just some broken plastic which I wouldn't have been using regardless.

I could see myself running a whole rack of headless laptops in the future. It's more likely than me buying a single new Pi at these prices.

[sigh] I've lost track of the number of times that I've suggested that instead of an ESP32 with small TFT screen for some web or BLE enabled project that doesn't require any I/O, you could just use a cheap phone or tablet and make life much easier. I'm downvoted every single time. I guess some people take pride in doing things the hard way.

If the Dell is old enough, you can use a printer port for some GPIO. Pretty trivial to use.

There are now cheap PCIe cards that provide 40-pin GPIO headers, check eBay. You might need an M.2 to PCIe riser if you don’t have a PCIe slot.

[flagged]

I've been making clusters from decommissioned thin clients, but they are mostly for the sake of managing clusters, not any useful compute. The workloads are Hercules emulating a VM/370 with or without MVS, and various SimH emulations of vintage computers of various sizes.