This is accidentally a fantastic example of the issues with the original commenter's train of thought. Not everyone needs every single feature, but every single feature is needed individually by someone.
yeah, with how many "maker" things have emerged around RPi, it's a bit of a dickpunch to be removing features that a nontrivial portion of the user base are building projects/products around.
Hopefully we have gotten past the "RPi is for education, not makers!" thing, there is really zero traction on big computer labs full of raspberry pis. even insofar as it's used in education it's still used for maker tasks, people building robots with computer vision or whatever, and some of those use-cases need the encoder too.
RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories). If it doesn't have video encode, why would I want this for plex instead of a NUC clone? why would I buy this instead of a big AVR32/STM32 microcontroller for building a robot? Why would I want this instead of a Bus Pirate for GPIO? Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it? Etc etc. It's barely an adequate product even with all the legacy feature set there, if you start pulling pieces off then competing products become even more compelling for many use-cases.
Reality is they will probably be fine because of the name recognition and brand but it's not good management either.
I'd love to see real numbers but just like with the RX 6500XT I just can't imagine the encoder is that big. We are talking about pennies more per die, and likely this will cost them more in total sales than the pennies represent in the total product cost - you are saving 0.1% of the MSRP and losing 5-10% of potential addressable market. Literally would just be better for them to eat the cost, almost certainly.
And you are correct that while nobody uses all the features, everybody uses some of them.
I frankly do not understand the decision to depart from mainstream SOC configurations here - which obviously would have an encoder.
> RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories).
In addition to what you wrote: it also has a really good software story. Everybody's got a build for raspberry pi. Something like an odroid or banana pi or whatever has a much more "gotta handle all the builds yourself" path. The power of being the standard, I suppose.
> Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it?
You can do a Teams call on it (with prerelease software). See two Pis conferencing that way here (call was slightly glitchy until one guy on the call figured out he needed to switch from his crappy wifi to a wired connection):
