What the author actually says
Pande's case is a personal one, not a lab test. His main points:
- Performance and compatibility: N100 mini PCs handle Jellyfin transcoding, emulation of heavier consoles, virtual machines, NAS builds and big Home Assistant setups better than a Pi 5, in his experience.
- Firewalls: A Pi needs a USB Ethernet adapter or a PCIe add-on for a second network port. Cheap dual-NIC x86 boxes avoid that.
- Where the Pi wins: The 40-pin header lets him wire sensors, motors and HATs straight to a board running a real OS. He says USB-to-GPIO bridge boards for mini PCs have given him compatibility trouble.
- Power draw: He reports his Pi 5 idling at 3–4W, with his cheapest mini PCs using nearly three times that. He says a first-generation Pi Zero running Tailscale and Pi-hole idles below 1W.
He gives no test method, meter or configuration details for the power figures. He also doesn't name the bridge boards that failed him. Treat both as one tinkerer's observations.
Pi prices: the story is real, but the "$200" figure needs care
Pande says 8GB Pi 5 boards cost "upwards of $200". The price pressure is real, but the published list prices don't back that figure for 8GB.
- Raspberry Pi's own February 2026 post said price rises had accelerated and some parts had more than doubled in cost over the last quarter. It blamed memory demand from the AI infrastructure build-out.
- Tom's Hardware's February table put the Pi 5 8GB at $125, up from $95 in December and $80 originally, with the 16GB at $205.
- Later rounds pushed prices higher. A price-tracking site, raspberry.tips, lists the 8GB Pi 5 at $175, against $80 at its September 2023 launch. It counts five rounds of increases between October 2025 and October 2026.
- Tom's Hardware's October piece shows a different figure for 8GB, $130 in both April and October. The sources disagree on the current 8GB price, so check a reseller before you buy.
- The top end keeps climbing. Notebookcheck reported on November 2 that the 16GB model's list price is rising from $305 to $385.
So the 8GB board is clearly far above its launch price, but "$200+" is not a manufacturer list price. Reseller markups and stock gaps can differ from list prices. Those gaps are probably what the author is describing.
The cheap end is more stable. Raspberry Pi said it left 1GB variants and the Pi 400 unaffected. Raspberry Pi's earlier price post said the Pi Zero and older LPDDR2-based boards would not rise, because the company holds several years' stock of that memory. That fits Pande's advice that the Zero line is the only part of the family he'd still recommend.
The mini PC side isn't immune either
Mini PCs aren't a free pass. Commenters on Raspberry Pi's own price post argued about this. One reported that N150 mini PCs had gone from about $150 to nearer $250. That is an anecdote from a comment thread, not market data. It does show the same memory shortage hitting x86 boxes. Anyone planning a swap should price the whole system: RAM, storage, power supply and networking.
For context on the N100 itself, Intel's comparison chart lists it as a four-core, four-thread part. Its figures are 3.40GHz max turbo, 6MB cache and 16GB maximum memory. Intel lists UHD Graphics as its GPU. Quick Sync transcoding results depend on drivers, codecs and software support, so Pande's Jellyfin experience is plausible but his own.
Proxmox: a claim that now needs a dated boundary
Pande writes that Proxmox is "still not officially supported" on Raspberry Pi hardware. That conclusion still holds, but the wording is dated. On August 5, 2026, Proxmox announced the first officially supported Arm64 edition of Proxmox Virtual Environment. That is a real change for anyone following ARM virtualization.
The announcement's named platforms are server-class, though. It says NVIDIA Grace and NVIDIA Vera systems are supported from the first release, and its validation work used Grace Hopper servers. It names no Raspberry Pi board. The research notes for this story say Proxmox's forum post excludes device-tree-only single-board computers such as the Pi. I couldn't confirm that wording independently here. So the safe summary is that Proxmox now has an official Arm64 edition, but it targets data-center hardware and the Pi isn't on the list. For a home-lab virtualization box, x86 remains the practical route.
Where the Pi still earns its desk space
Raspberry Pi's documentation describes a standard 40-pin header on its boards. The pins carry GPIO plus alternate functions such as SPI, I²C, UART and PWM. On the Pi 5, the RP1 I/O chip supplies much of that functionality. The practical point is that this header is standardized, documented and backed by years of community projects. A typical mini PC has nothing like it.
"x86 boxes don't have GPIO" is a bit too absolute. Some industrial and embedded x86 boards do expose I/O, and USB adapters can add it. But for a consumer N100 box, Pande's conclusion holds: you need an adapter, and adapter support varies by chip and OS.
If you do wire up hardware, a few safety points apply:
- Check the pinout for your exact board before connecting anything.
- Remember that standard GPIO signals use 3.3V logic. Raspberry Pi's documentation warns that wrong wiring can damage the board or the peripheral.
- Don't treat GPIO pins as power supplies for motors or other loads. Use proper drivers and external power.
- Note that the Zero family isn't uniform. The official page lists the original Zero as a 1GHz single-core, 512MB board with a 40-pin header. That is a different tier from the Zero 2 W, and headers may arrive unsoldered. Raspberry Pi says the original Zero will remain in production until at least January 2030.
Verdict
Pande's rule of thumb is sound:
- Pick a mini PC when you need x86 software, Windows, Proxmox, more storage options, or multiple network ports.
- Pick a Pi (usually a Zero) when the project is GPIO plus an OS, or when sub-5W idle draw matters.
- Pick an ESP32 for pure sensor work that needs no OS, as the author himself does.
The article's weak spots are the fuzzy price claim and the Proxmox wording. Its idle-power numbers are one person's setup, not a benchmark. Compare the full cost and power draw for your own workload before you retire a Pi.