Haven't really heard the power consumption argument, perhaps it has increased in the last 12 months. In general the $35-70 SBCs (when they could be bought in retail) reveal an ugly truth: circa 99% of users don't ever need more than that in processing power/memory, even disk space with all the clouds for everything, hence all the $1,000+ machines (laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones) are just massive overkill and a terrible waste.
> In general the $35-70 SBCs (when they could be bought in retail) reveal an ugly truth: circa 99% of users don't ever need more than that in processing power/memory, even disk space with all the clouds for everything, hence all the $1,000+ machines (laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones) are just massive overkill and a terrible waste.
I suspect that quite a bit more than 1% of users play graphics heavy games or otherwise tax their machine beyond the practical limit of a cheap ARM SBC. If you'd said 2/3, I'd be much more inclined to agree.
True, however it is going to be harder and harder to pay $2,000+ for a top GPU to play the latest AAA game, and it is going to easier and easier to pay ~$10/month for a cloud-rendered gaming subscription. Stadia was just cursed for being a non-ads-based Google product, GeForce Now seems to be thriving [1].
Somewhat funny is that the top 2 and 3 PC games most popular in 2022 have 1993 graphics, Minecraft and Roblox [2]. Another list puts Minecraft on 4 and Roblox on 3 [3].
