The Raspberry Pi 2 Zero is as fast as a Pi 3, way smaller, and only costs $13 I think.

The high end Pis aren’t $25 though.

The Pi 4 is still fine for a lot of low end use cases and starts at $35. The Pi 5 is in a harder position. I think the CM5 and Pi 500 are better showcases for it than the base model.

	▲	pseudosavant 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Between the microcontrollers, Zero models, the Pi 4, and the Pi 5, they have quite a full-range from very inexpensive and low power to moderate price/performance SBCs. One of the bigger problems with Pi 5, is that many of the classic Pi use cases don't benefit from more CPU than the Pi 4 had. PCIe is nice, but you might as well go CM5 if you want something like that. The 16GB model would be more interesting if it had the GPU/bandwidth to do AI/tokens at a decent rate, but it doesn't. I still think using any other brand of SBC is an exercise in futility though. Raspberry Pi products have the community, support, ecosystem behind them that no other SBC can match.