Which arm device is significantly cheaper than and quality equal to modern Raspberry?
as needed to fulfill all/most coding accomplishments ~91-95% as capacity as that of being done in average good laptop ?
I doubt you’ll find anything that benefits from the enormous economies of scale that the Raspberry Pi does. If the RPi4 is too expensive, older versions can get the job done, albeit with less performance.
I asked myself the same question and snooped around for a few weeks a while ago. Didn't find anything that is a lot cheaper with the same quality. I even searched Aliexpress and the spin-offs are not really cheaper enough to justify the potential degradation of quality (I'm not saying they are of poor quality, just that I don't know).
I think Raspberry Pi enjoys from economies of scale so much that it doesn't even has boxing day deals. It's really cheap enough considering a 4GB Pi4 module only costs $72.95 in CAD. If you want there are clearance sales on pishop.ca:
Just a note that those clearance get cleared really quickly. I'm also thinking about getting a few second-hand Pi for a cluster I'm trying to build (which can cut down the cost further), but the thing is it's difficult to find reliable used Pi in local market.
My understanding is that Broadcom subsidizes the Raspberry Pi in some fashion, which is why the binary blobs that drive everything in Raspbian are tolerated.
You're not likely to find anything better and cheaper, ever.
