This serves as a mini pc, a good emulation platform, and a great FREEnas/PFsense box (Two Gigabit Inter NICs). There's no comparison at all with a raspberry pi apart from the Hat compatibility. The fact that it does have a microcontroller and Arduino pinout might come in handy, but the 8 gb of RAM is not just for Windows. A router or NAS Benefit a lot from them too. The Price is just the same or lower as equivalent alternatives, It seems like some commenters don't really know what to do with this board, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it's useless for the price. The writer of the article could have done a bit of research tho.

This is not a board on the same league as that of a RaspberryPI. I've used similar boards (Udoo x86, Udoo Bolt, Latte Panda, and 1 Atomic PI), for projects where I needed real horse power, etc.

This kind of projects, sometimes, benefit from having Arduino/RPi pinout (or any pinout at all, vs PCs without easy hardware connections). And it's price is right for that market (Udoo runs at 178€).

Really! $200? Why should someone buy this instead of r pi which is $50? I would buy much powerful motherboard for this price

A poor motherboard not comparable to a Raspberry Pi. Why I need such device? To pay licenses to Microsoft? The robotics people don't need to replace the freedom.
Thanks but, I will not need it.

It's just a motherboard for that price. Not a very powerful motherboard but a motherboard just the same. Why compare it to a raspberry pi?

Like everybody else, I have no idea why this was compared to a Ras Pi.  It seems like a nice enough little PC board.  Yay.  But nobody needs Win 10 and nvme in the same breath as Arduino and embedded projects.  Seems odd to give the reader a wildly misplaced framing, just to disappoint expectations.

8GB of RAM!  This is obviously designed for running Microsoft Windows and Raspbian with the desktop runs in 1GB on a little $35 Raspberry Pi.  So pretty much someone is attempting to be relevant when everyone else is running Linux in embedded bots.

And because world+dog is running bots on Linux on Raspberry Pi's, the marketing people needed to throw in that "comparable to Raspberry Pi" bit to make the news feeds.

Nice try but the average Linux/rPi devs are not as dumb as these marketing people think.  Pitch it to the PC Mag Windows crowd and leave the rPi parts out.

Pretty sure this article was written by AI. That or dude *really* needs more coffee..

if i needed an intel nuc alternative then this would be it.

It's Bluetooth 5. Not Bluetooth 5.0

Wow....this is NOT a Raspberry PI alternative at all.  Clearly the Author has no clue about the Raspberry PI.  At this price point, you might as well just buy a normal motherboard and build your own PC. 

Now if you dropped the price from almost $200, down to say, $50....then I would say it's an alternative.

If I was going to drop $188 down on something, I would rather just start slowly building my own PC.  At that point I can adjust how much RAM I want, what video output I want, what Hard Drives I want....etc.

The article really missed it's mark.....by thousands of miles.

The point of the RPI was to be affordable for low income households, and to allow younger people to start learning programming and coding languages with an RPI which would help them get better jobs and out of the low income brackets in the future.

This is not a competitor at all.

Not really a competitor at that price.  I just picked up a brand new NUC off Amazon for less and got a quad core Pentium. 

Check out the Atomic Pi.  X86 and also runs Windows 10.  Less than $50

Raspberry Pi alternative buy vastly more expensive. Either way, still pretty neat.