No more than a phone solves the 99 percentile use case better than a small PC does.
I have a custom-built fluid handler built from a Rpi and a $20 3.5" touchscreen, a $6 Arduino relay board and some additional hardware. I need the GPIO to run pumps and valves and additional I/O. Could it be done on a phone? Yes, with additional hardware and more effort. The lower cost of the phone would be eaten up in the first hour it took me longer than on the Pi.
I've recommended to many people contemplating complex Arduino projects that they move to the Pi instead. Often, by the time you purchase multiple Arduino "shields" to do a task, you're well past the price of a Raspberry Pi that has all the needed I/O: networking, audio output, storage and more built in.
Hell, I'm involved in a high-speed signal processing project where I use an Arduino M0 for the speed but I still needed to do some of the behavior in analog circuits because the Cortex M0 still wasn't fast enough to process everything digitally. I would have preferred to use a Pi but I don't trust the reliability (industrial application), and I need guaranteed real-time behavior.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that many hobbyist RPi projects could be done just as well on a phone: I noticed that quite some time ago. But hardware is less and less the limiting factor these days. Learning curves can be expensive. I tend to build things in small volumes, so any price savings from using a cheap phone or tablet is often meaningless in comparison to how long it will take me to get up to speed on a new platform.
I have a custom-built fluid handler built from a Rpi and a $20 3.5" touchscreen, a $6 Arduino relay board and some additional hardware. I need the GPIO to run pumps and valves and additional I/O. Could it be done on a phone? Yes, with additional hardware and more effort. The lower cost of the phone would be eaten up in the first hour it took me longer than on the Pi.
I've recommended to many people contemplating complex Arduino projects that they move to the Pi instead. Often, by the time you purchase multiple Arduino "shields" to do a task, you're well past the price of a Raspberry Pi that has all the needed I/O: networking, audio output, storage and more built in.
Hell, I'm involved in a high-speed signal processing project where I use an Arduino M0 for the speed but I still needed to do some of the behavior in analog circuits because the Cortex M0 still wasn't fast enough to process everything digitally. I would have preferred to use a Pi but I don't trust the reliability (industrial application), and I need guaranteed real-time behavior.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that many hobbyist RPi projects could be done just as well on a phone: I noticed that quite some time ago. But hardware is less and less the limiting factor these days. Learning curves can be expensive. I tend to build things in small volumes, so any price savings from using a cheap phone or tablet is often meaningless in comparison to how long it will take me to get up to speed on a new platform.