I bought a rasberry pi kit for a friend's kid the other day. He's sixteen and thinking of going into engineering but he doesn't have any mentors around the house.
Given that I don't know much about his home situation except that he has a game box (which implies a display) I got one of the kits that includes case, keyboard, mouse, pre-loaded SD card and all the cables. Given that I'm a bit of a cheapskate I looked back a couple of generation and got one based on a 3A+ instead of something more modern.
Frankly, however, I don't feel at all sorry for him becuase I'm flabbergasted by the raw power of this allegedly obsolete embedded board. It has four cores and each one is roughly as powerful as the machine I analyzed my dissertation data on. It has eight time as much RAM. It has only about sixty times the persistent storage becuase the cheap kit I chose comes with a "small" SD card. It has vastly better networking hardware.
There is only one metric where my old machine might have been better: back then I has spent a lot of my advisor's money on a 10,000 RPM fast-and-wide SCSI2 drive with a large and smart cache (for the era, natch),1 so I think I had better achieved bandwidth to persistent storage.
1 This was an informed choice, the software I going to run did a lot of logging and looking things up in disk-based databases as it processed large volumes of input into large volumes of output. It was generally IO bound on the big shared servers that were available at the lab. As a result of not being IO bound my PII desktop actually processed files faster than the big HPs. Even though I had given up about 10% of the available clockspeed to get that disk system and still squeak in under budget.
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