For Mathematica, the graphical outputs and the vast pallette of functions is truly marvelous. IMO it feels a much superior product to Maple & MATLAB. If only they could make it bit more affordable to individual hobbyists. If I remember right, it is $200 per year (incl. tax). That does pinch the pockets a bit, specially if you are from a developing country.
EDIT: A thought that comes to my mind is that Jetbrains products are similarly placed in pricing. But YoY costs actually go down. Furthermore, you are allowed to retain the last subscribed version which you paid in full. You can use the same license on all your machines/VMs. This is not the case with Wolfram products. The pricing stays the same if you want the point updates to be fetched. You cannot use the product if your subscription ends and individual licenses are limited to 1 (or 2?) machines. This does hurt!
That service model purchases the available version of the product without any updates (patches are free for some (3?) months, but needs a recurring SLA if you want to update anything or call their online API).
That quickly turns out to be even more expensive than the subscription if you realistically want to develop something on that platform (for e.g a data analytics course, mapping overlays, queries - pretty much anything standard which one needs to teach or demonstrate to students. It isn't even a power-usecase)
PS: I made that mistake with v11.3. Abandoned it later.
I think updates are free for a year, the desktop version can still connect for 3,000 monthly Wolfram|Alpha API calls perpetually, and you can use the basic cloud version perpetually (but files are only saved for 60 days.)
Never done symbolic math in Mathematica but I have done it extensively in SymPy and Matlab. The symbolic toolbox is surprisingly powerful and performant compared to SymPy and I've never really been left wanting more.
Mathematica has a LOT more integrated into the base product. Matlab requires a toolbox for nearly everything and many toolboxes cost more than a Mathematica license. I enjoy Mathematica, but find Matlab to be inferior to Python development and very expensive.
I think Matlab is starting to realize this, at least at the institutional level they are starting to offer all the toolboxes for a fixed price (much much lower than buying all the boxes individually)
I don't care about home use. If my company wants to use Matlab, they shouldn't have to pay like $5k for the database toolbox and $5k for the optimization toolbox on top of my license.
MATLAB individual license for base product is actually lower, but toolboxes can cost a fortune. Student/Home version does not have several features inbuilt which have to be bought separately. Also the symbolic math support is dodgy. If I had to do Numpy type of operations only, I will take Numpy over MATLAB because its open source and free.
Symbolic math in matlab is vastly inferior to Mathematica, and the deep learning and reinforcement learning toolboxes are vastly inferior to the offerings in python.
However for control system design or digital signal processing I think matlab is superior to both, I also think the matlab IDE is severely underated.
These are just from my experiences, I’m sure each of these languages have other applications where they are superior to the other too.
I also speak with privilege as someone who has access to all these packages for free so..
It is practically unusable to the point of being a joke on Raspberry pi. Mathematica still takes couple of seconds on my 8-core/64GB rig to compute a non-trivial expression, notwithstanding any manual simplification. There is a noticeable time to boot the program where you stare at the Wolfram Spikey. The benchmarks are brutal no matter which Raspberry pi you choose:
Yes, with a rpi you are going back 15-20 years in performance. I don't know that I would call that unusable. People used Mathematica on the G5 PowerPC, which was in the same ballpark in the benchmarks you cite.
So I guess... for hobbyists, it just depends on your hobby.
I am okay with a G5-spec if everything else remained as they were 20 years ago. They haven't.
Datasets have grown in size exponentially. You deal with images which are no longer few kilobytes. Window managers in the GUI have to paint over a much larger display area even if you consider whitespace. To do a hobby project like for e.g build a toy spam-filter or a toy classifier, the prompt to execution takes over 6 minutes on a really tiny model. I don't see why this hobby project angle seems viable either. Hence, why I said its unusable practically.
EDIT: A thought that comes to my mind is that Jetbrains products are similarly placed in pricing. But YoY costs actually go down. Furthermore, you are allowed to retain the last subscribed version which you paid in full. You can use the same license on all your machines/VMs. This is not the case with Wolfram products. The pricing stays the same if you want the point updates to be fetched. You cannot use the product if your subscription ends and individual licenses are limited to 1 (or 2?) machines. This does hurt!