I understand that peoppe usually use medium PI boards for electronic projects. But other that, isn't it more cost effective and organized if you get minipc (something like N100 kit) for projects like backups machine or selfhosting projects?
There's trade-offs in both directions, but largely rPI has marginally lower performance and power consumption compared to the N100.
If you're not touching GPIO or need to stay under 15W strictly, then the PI is the better option. N100's seem to be slightly more expensive if buying from MSRP, but the second-hand market is much more competitive and there are more discounts available with N100 systems. RPI's are considered hobbiest tech so hold their value and are rarely discounted.
A raspberry pi 5 is still 2 to 3 times less power hungry than a N100. If one has no need for the power, it makes totally sense to just use a raspberry.
It's a pretty common sentiment I've seen and agree with. Though I think the Pi 4 is still cost effective for its price if you don't need as much processing power.
N100 blows it out of the water for anything that just needs uptime, reliable and fast storage, speed and video encoding/decoding.
You can get an N100 16GB ram with 500GB M2 storage for about $200 range, which if you were to spec out a Pi with a case, cooling, proper storage, correct cables you'd be getting close or past that.
Obviously electronics or GPIO projects I'd still go with Pi.
For home (mini) server use cases, cheap/unbranded x86 SBCs are also my favorites, especially because they can be easily expanded (I've put two disks for reliability).
Also, at least until some time ago, ARM compatibility was not always guaranteed by open source projects (I think nowadays it became ubiquitous).
You can sometimes even get new ones. I picked up 5 Dell Optiplex 3050's brand new in box on ebay last year for £58 (~$75 USD) a pop. Even came with a keyboard and mouse. You get a lot of office clearances on there where its places that have just bought excess then never ended up using them.
The ones I nabbed were the i7 6700T's with 16GB ram and a 128gb ssd. Total bargain and not at all that rare to find on there these days around that price point.
Oh they also all came with a Windows hardware license, not that I wanted it but another bonus.
