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I heartily second Andy’s recommendation of the Raspberry Pi 5 (@2:17:08). The Pi4 was definitely getting rather old, but this board puts them back in the game. An integrated optional heat sink with fan from the RPi Foundation sounds like a winner, or you can roll your own active or passive cooling. The PCIe 2.0 x1 interface should provide some nice options for faster storage, etc.
One interesting option only available for RPi SBCs is Wolfram Research’s Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi. They have been supporting this platform with regular updates coming up on 10 years. In my scorecard, this is a gift that gets significantly larger over time; a Pi 5 running Mathematica 13.1 provides some serious computational/visualization/programming resources. The computational power of the Pi5 makes for a pretty darn serious platform. You can also hang the Pi off of a fast WiFi router to have the resource available anywhere on your home network. “Wolfram U” regularly provides free courses that are led by highly qualified (typically postdoc-level) instructors. This would be a fantastic tool to know how to use before entering University.
It very much depends on what you are doing with it. I just sold my Pi400, because I never use it, it is too power thirsty and my Pi 3s are more than fast enough for the tasks I am doing, whilst using a fraction of the electricity.
The Pi 5 is certainly a very nice new high-end device, but, unless you really are pushing the performance of other Pis, it is additive, rather than a replacement, it is more expensive and costs more to run. If you don’t need that additional performance, right-sizing for the task at hand will be much more economical in the long run. For your example of Mathematica, the 5 would be a huge leap forward, for a Pihole you are just pouring money down the drain for badge-bragging-rights.
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I think you might be overstating the costs here. The idle power is still pretty low, on the order of 3.5W. Presumably the power usage will scale with the CPU utilization for the task you put it to. I think any device under 10W is pretty cheap to run on a long term basis. 10W/h over a year is only 88kW a year which could cost less than $20/year to run if you’re paying around (or less) than $0.20/kWh. I mean it’s not free or anything, and sure, using less is smarter and better, but also don’t forget that the single largest expenses in most homes are refrigeration and cooling/heating.
We were paying around 25c/KWh, but the Ukraine conflict more than doubled that, at the peak, although it is slowly coming back down to more sane levels.
I looked up our rates in North Carolina: 11.66c/KWh. That’s probably one of the lowest prices in the US. We’re generally oblivious to the wattage consumed by our devices.
One of the great features of the Raspberry Pi architecture is that all of those old processors are still available. Those who are knowledgable can get enough bang for the specific tasks.
I hope that the mini-HDMI connectors work better on this new unit…
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Regarding longevity, most of the people I know replace their phones, when their favourite app stops working. They aren’t into Android or Apple, they don’t want the latest features - in fact, they are liable to smash the device against the wall, if it starts to act differently or features suddenly move to somewhere else on the phone.
I upgraded my wife’s phone’s version of 1Password, because she was still using an older version. She was so frustrated, was literally seconds away from throwing it away. She had learnt how to use her iPhone how it was, she doesn’t want new features, she just wants it to be safe and private (as a technophobe, she is more into privacy than I am, which is hard to imagine) and to not change.
On the other side, my daughters want new phones, but they just can’t afford them at the moment. My youngest daughter is still using my old Galaxy S20+, which is fine for her, she’d like something newer, but nothing in her price range (under 300€) comes close on features or performance. My eldest is in the middle of a complete renovation of the house they bought, so her iPhone X will have to hold out another 3-4 years, probably.
When I look at other friends and family, the situation is pretty much the same, I know a couple of “techno freaks”, who get a new phone every 2 years, but the average is between 8 and 10 years for everyone else. That means that a vast majority of the people I know are running around with a phone that hasn’t seen a security update (let alone a feature update) in years.
The EU has recognised this, to a degree, requiring manufacturers to provide security updates for at least 5 years and spare parts for even longer (wrong way round, IMHO, the security updates are more important, if the battery needs replacing, but your phone isn’t secure, you should let it die gracefully). This might be one of the reasons for Google’s changing attitude. The other is that they use their own Tensor chip now, so they are in charge of drivers, until recently, they were beholden to Qualcomm, like most other manufacturers, which stopped supplying updated drivers for new versions of the OS after a couple of years.
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I’m really not sure there is a large faction of iMac users clamoring for a machine with a M3 chip. iMac users, it seems to me, are people who want a household computer, and don’t really do anything on the machine that takes a lot of power. My wife gifted me a purple M1 iMac for Christmas right after they came out. I do more on my computers than most of my fellow 60 y/o friends, and I know I’ve never come close to doing anything that would tax the chip in that machine.
I can always rationalize the “need” for a new iPhone, but I can’t say the same for my iMac, which will probably be sitting on the desk for several more years.
Also, I agree with Jason, on the colors of the Pro phones this year. Yet ultimately, I can’t say I know one person who doesn’t slap a case on their phones the moment they get it. Over the years, there have been plenty of times that I’ve forgotten what color my phone actually is under the Otterbox Defender…
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I used to upgrade my computers ever 18 months or so, but these days, it is a case of waiting until there are no security updates, the software I need no longer works on my current set-up or the old one breaks. Lack of performance is very rarely a reason to upgrade, because, unless you are a heavy video or audio editor, you just aren’t pushing the hardware enough to warrant an upgrade.
I have an M1 mini and I wouldn’t mind the M2 Pro version or a MacBook Pro 14" with Pro chip, but I just can’t justify it, because the current one is more than fast enough for my needs.
Heck, at work, I have an 8GB MacBook Air and, with a Parallels VM running Windows 11 on ARM, it is still faster than my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 was, before it died a couple of weeks back.
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I wanted to comment on Alex’s pick of Paprika Recipe Manager. I was all set to buy Paprika, since I needed a good recipe manager. Then I saw that the Mac version cost $30.00.
After more investigating, there were a lot of complaints that the developer is completely unresponsive. Doesn’t respond to emails or reviews left about the app.
So, before you spend $29.99, do a little bit of homework.
I ended up buying Mela instead.
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I replace my phones every 2.5 or so years - 2 generations so there are usually actual upgrades in tech - 6 months or so for the first buyers to find the bugs 
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