In 2022, when Pi4s were going for $150-200, I managed to get a 7th gen NUC for about $150. I was looking to start Home Assistant, so both were viable options, but even the Pi5’s coming close to $100 retail, spending 50% more gets you a lot more performance for a 7th gen intel i5/i7 mobile chip, 16gb of RAM and a 256GB NVME.

Intel or Mellanox are both pretty solid.

I would say it’s not the BEST solution but in areas in the extreme north/south, where solar/hydro aren’t options (and I legit have no idea how well wind would do with freezing weather/snow etc) it would be better to have nuclear there than to try and transmit long distance to those areas. At least until we get some more breakthroughs in energy storage.

American internet isn’t all crap. I pay about $70 for Gigabit.

Honestly I’m going down a lot of HDMI-CEC magic and a Broadlink with Hone Assistant to make up the rest. Perhaps a zigbee button remote triggering some HA calls?

Harmony is EOL these days as well.