A used notebook was also better in price to performance 10 years ago, no?

Yeash, but not as good as an alternative to a PI back then, since 8 year old notebooks 10 years ago (so 18 year old notebooks today) were too bulky and power hungry to be a real alternative. Power bricks were all 90W and CPU TDW was 35-45W. But notebooks from the 2018 era (intel 8th gen) have quite low power chips that make a good PI alternatives nowadays.

The mobile and embedded X86 chips have closed the gap a lot in power consumption since the PI first launched.

Now you can even get laptops with broken screens for free, and just use their motherboard as a home server alternative to a PI. Power consumption will be a bit higher, but not enough to offset the money you just saved anytime soon.

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jasomill 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can get a 5-year-old laptop with a perfectly working screen for free if you're on good terms with the owner of a company who has a stack of them sitting in a storage closet waiting for disposal. :)

Which is basically just cutting out the middlemen in a transaction that might cost $100 on eBay.

Used corporate laptops are particularly cost-effective if you're interested in running Windows, as unlike Intel NUCs and most SBC products, they typically include hardware-locked Windows 10 Pro licenses which can be upgraded to Windows 11 Pro for free.

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kalaksi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Laptops are still pretty bulky and power hungry in comparison if you're looking for very SFF and passive cooling.

	▲	kube-system 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Pop open a cheap Celeron N laptop, and often, the motherboard inside is essentially a passively cooled SBC. https://www.insidemylaptop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Le... The big pain with using something like this would mostly be the IO and odd form factor.