Raspberry Pi 4 Alternatives: Five ARM Contenders
Low-cost ARM SBC review, including the Banana Pi M5, VIM1s, Odroid C4, Rock 3A, and the Orange Pi 5 4GB. – Feb 2023
You may be interested in that some of the Pi-hole developers heavily use NanoPis for their ARM adventures. It was a lot cheaper while also more powerful than the Raspberry Pis available at that time (around 2017). I haven't bought from them recently but I was always very satisfied with value for money (current RPis are just ridiculously expensive).
Eben Upton blogged in December 2022:
"We expect supply to recover to pre-pandemic levels in the second quarter of 2023, and to be unlimited in the second half of the year."
So not long to wait now for Pis at their normal price.
Those NanoPis look really nice, lots of choice. Not seen them before, I'll check them first when I next want to buy a board. I like the router variant, might be able to put that to use as a travel router the way @jfb described a while back (he uses a TP-Link). I'm looking for something I can use as a decent firewall at the moment, to supplement Pi-hole on the network.
@Moto indeed, he explains the background to it all in an earlier interview with EC too. As you say, hopefully pricing and availability tends back towards normal later this year.
I recently moved from SBC to a refurbished Fujitsu Futro S740 (~50€ with case, power supply, 8GB RAM, 16GB SSD, passive cooling). It has a J4105 x86 CPU, a small footprint and a really low power consumption. With some docker services next to Pi-hole it uses ~2.3 Watt.
I barely used the GPIO and a RPi-size footprint is not a requirement (stays in the self all the time anyway).
I would definitely recommend everyone to think about their requirements and if they really need a RPi-sized gadget looking at the current prices.