Upon looking around at various Raspberry Pi models and competitors, one thing that I realized was running short was not compute features per se, but energy consumption metrics. What was the various energy consumption of the boards in relation to the features that they provided? Which single-board computers were most energy-efficient for the tasks that they do?
Unfortunately, when you think about it, you realize energy consumption is something that consumers really don’t care about, which is why government regulation is so important toward increasing energy efficiency. Yeah, sure the new technology comes out that can be more energy efficient, but how do you convince all manufacturers to use it? This needs to be done so that when a consumer buys any technology at random, it will keep progressively using the more energy efficient technology.
Anyways, although I love the features of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, upon looking at the energy consumption, and taking into consideration my intended use, I instead decided to go with the Raspberry Pi 1 B+. The extra 100mA idle power consumption from the Gigabit Ethernet interface, which can’t even put out a full gigabit, the 2.5A recommended power supply, and the fact that I strongly wanted to optimize idle power consumption meant that the Raspberry Pi 1 B+ was a far better choice than the 3 B+, not to mention that by this year of 2018 the models are selling a few dollars cheaper than their original list price.