It’s going to be all of those but especially power consumption and form factor. I’d be interested to see someone log how much power they use on idle/serving simple k8s tasks, etc.
Plus, they’re just not well built if you have to open them up for any reason. Do-able, but not confidence instilling.
Plus, at the scale enterprise probably uses NUCs they should sell second hand at 50-100$. But of course nowadays that gets 2xed by some middle man. At that point, it’s not such a compelling case to buy something they probably kept booted 24/7 for 5 years.
Or buy one of these RPis, accept the salt of that deal, but at least it’s actually new.
That's basically my impression. The Pi has been notoriously pricey these past few years, but computing-power-per-dollar is far from the only consideration when picking an alternative.
I think it really mostly comes down to power consumption - you can get a brand new mini PC with something like a N5095 celeron for not much more than $100. And it's also the pi ecosystem vs the x86 ecosystem.
You can probably get everything you need working on x86 in my experience. The Pi still needs some binaries. Granted, I’m thankful and we all benefit from the blob, but still.