I’ll put this here, up front. I love SBCs, and I love the Raspberry Pi. I love reading about projects that people do with them, I love tinkering with them, and I love seeing all the new hardware that’s coming on the horizon. So, I hope you don’t chase me with pitchforks when I say that sometimes—sometimes!—a mini PC does the job better than a Raspberry Pi. I know, I know, but it’s the truth. So, here are some of the Raspberry Pi projects I’ve done in the past that I kind of wish I just used a mini PC for.
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Using it as a mini PC
Let’s start this off with a “duh” moment
So when I first got into SBCs, I really wanted to see if it could out-mini PC a mini PC. I was kind of naive; I didn’t really know what I was getting into, and I essentially saw the Raspberry Pi as a computer you can stuff in your pocket. I can bring a little work station wherever I go on a board the size of a credit card! What’s not to love?
Well, I tried using it as a mini PC in hopes that the ability to literally stuff a whole computer into a pocket and carry it wherever I wanted to would outweigh the reduced hardware specifications. Turns out, trying to make a Raspberry Pi 3 your daily driver with multitasking work with a video on the side was pretty miserable. The lack of ports made it really hard to attach all the hardware I needed to get the job done. Plus, what was the point of bringing the Pi around with me, anyway? I’d need a screen to even get it working. It was an optimistic project, but no, I couldn’t make a Pi outdo a mini PC at its own game. Maybe a Pi 5 would be better?
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Using it for gaming
A mini PC just did the job better
I also had a stint where I tried using a Raspberry Pi for playing both emulated and simple games. The idea was that it’d be like a miniature console that I could bring out whenever I wanted to play something. Sure, it wouldn’t be running Cyberpunk 2077 any time soon, but I wanted to, say, emulate something or play a less intense game, it should be good.
It’s entirely possible to make a gaming console out of a Pi (and several XDA writers have done just that), but when compared to a mini PC with a dedicated GPU, the latter just has it beat. I could play more games, run them better, and install Windows on the PC for maximum compatibility.
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There wasn’t much need for the Pi
Finally, there’s the time I had the grand idea of using a Raspberry Pi as a media center. The idea was that I could set up a media center OS on the Pi and have it as an on-demand service that I could tap into whenever I like. And given how small the Raspberry Pi is, it makes for an elegant, discreet way to put movies or music onto a bigger screen.
However, I found myself not falling in love with the idea of using a separate media center with a Raspberry Pi. If I wanted to get media onto a bigger screen, I found it more convenient to beam it over using a mini PC instead of setting up the Pi. And I’m sure, for some use cases, the Raspberry Pi is ideal. However, if I’m already at my PC, it makes a lot more sense for me to just use that to cast media instead of setting up a Pi to do the same job.
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Despite it all, I still love the Pi
That’s not to say that a mini PC will always be the better choice over a Raspberry Pi. I’d like to see someone squeeze a mini-ITX motherboard into a sensor-based system, for example. However, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the SBC doesn’t hold a candle to mini PCs for more demanding tasks.
